Psychology / Self-help – Kindred Mediahttp://kindredmedia.org
Sharing the New Story of Childhood, Parenthood, and the Human FamilyTue, 07 Aug 2018 17:40:18 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.8Bullfrogs And Graveyards: On A Sense Of Belonginghttp://kindredmedia.org/2018/07/bullfrogs-and-graveyards-on-a-sense-of-belonging/
http://kindredmedia.org/2018/07/bullfrogs-and-graveyards-on-a-sense-of-belonging/#respondMon, 09 Jul 2018 17:23:03 +0000http://kindredmedia.org/?p=21556Jug-a-rum, jug-a-rum, jug-a-rum. I don’t think much of the Westchesters who own the vacation house next door. But I think a lot about their pond. My bedroom windows are up against the state forest, and as I fall to sleep at night, they channel in the songs of the thrushes. The clerestories above me […]

I don’t think much of the Westchesters who own the vacation house next door.But I think a lot about their pond.My bedroom windows are up against the state forest, and as I fall to sleep at night, they channel in the songs of the thrushes.The clerestories above me face south, and capture the bullfrog chorus from the Westchester’s pond. Together the bullfrogs and thrushes create the solstice symphony that sends me into blissful sleep.

The Westchesters were up last weekend.We worked all day Saturday, and didn’t see much of them, save for listening to their ATVs run up and down the dirt roads that run through the State Land. We thought it was strange that the bullfrogs were quiet that night.On Sunday, Ula figured out why.

“They’re dragging something out into the water,” she came running up the road from her walk to tell me.She dove into the house, preparing for what she expected would come next.As the door shut, the explosion from next door rattled our timbers.Dusky and Nikky ran to hide under the beds.I went to the window and saw smoke rising from the pond.Apparently they were firing at tannerites, legal explosive targets.A few minutes later, the automatic rifle fire ensued.

For an hour, the house rattled and shook.Bob’s jaw clenched tight as he sat on the porch with Ula, trying to help her with a buoyancy experiment without losing his temper.I laid down on the bed and tried to snuggle the dogs through the onslaught.Saoirse stormed and paced, her fury shaking our rafters more than the gun fire.

“You need to do something!”She screamed at me.“They can’t do this!”

“The law says they can,” I kept my voice soft, conscious of alarming the dogs, cautious not to raise the stress level in the house to the point of Bob’s anger forcing an unpleasant confrontation with the neighbors.

As long as the Westchesters discharge their weapons at least 500 feet from my home, there is no authority that will interfere.The pond is 500 feet.

“You have to go over there and stop them!”

I kept my face placid, but inwardly I winced.Because in that moment, Saoirse was discovering that I’m not the superhero she thought I was.

I would not confront the neighbors.“We don’t want conflict with them,” I tried to explain.“Because then, whenever we come home and they’re up, this will be a war zone, and not a place of peace.”

“They don’t have the right to do this!”

“They’ll get bored soon.”I walked away to the kitchen and began putting lunch together.She stormed up to her room.The explosions alternated between tannerites, shot guns, automatic weapons, and then, I think, a few fireworks thrown in for good measure.By the time lunch was on the table, however, our mountaintop had fallen silent again.Yup.They got bored.

But the bullfrogs didn’t sing that night.

A few days later, we put packs on our backs and trek off into the state forest behind our house.We go down to Mallet pond and pitch our tents, celebrating the start of summer beside the water’s edge for a few days.I take joy that those bullfrogs are still going strong.

On the day of the solstice, we take off on a trek with an unknown destination.We follow the dirt roads and trails through the state land until we get up to the holding ponds above Mallet.There, we see that the Westchesters must have had a busy Saturday.On Friday, Bob and I had hiked to these ponds, and they were serene as ever.But on the solstice, we see the damage from their ATVs.They’ve broken the bank of the larger pond, flooded the trail, performed donuts in the mud, created small flooding rivers.We follow the ruts further into the forest, and any place the winter storms laid down a tree across the path, they rammed their vehicles into the woods and over the stone walls built by the settlers here in the 1840s, grinding them down into the forest floor.

Our solstice celebration is turning into a mourning for our public land.Saoirse’s fourteen-year-old sense of outrage and justice rings through the woods.“We have to catch them at it!We have to take them to court!”

And, once again, I have no words, no plans, no ideas to salve this teenager’s outrage.Bob engages both girls in reading the forested landscape around them.He momentarily distracts Saoirse from her fire and fury by urging her to decode history from the clues around her.

And I go into myself, marveling at my sense of powerlessness over this problem; agog that so few people can do so much damage in so little time.I wallow in Bob’s and my impotence.We teach our daughters to stand up for what they believe.We urge them to live their lives based on their most deeply-held values.And then, we stay quiet while the neighbors trash our state forest.But we cannot win this battle.

We’ve tried seeking justice in the past.It doesn’t work.DEC officers cannot be in all places at once; we can’t predict when people will set out to destroy our lands; and the officers cannot convict based on our observations alone.Instead, I try to get the girls to understand the despair and lack of imagination that fuels this destructive behavior.“No one taught them how to be in the woods,” I often say.“They don’t know how to simply enjoy it.”“They’re too restless inside to accept the quiet.” “They just know how to buy whatever’s sold to them; and then smash and destroy.”But on this solstice, my oft-repeated words ring hollow to my oldest daughter.

Saoirse wants to wish upon them injury; something to stop them from their actions.I remind her of the rule of three:whatever you put out in the universe comes back to you three times.Instead, I urge her to wish for them inner peace and quiet joys.

We follow the trail deeper, to a point where the Westchesters must have grown bored yet again,as the destruction comes to a stop.We stay on it until it brings us up to another dirt road, and that leads us past a swamp, rich in loquacious bullfrogs to counsel my soul.Just beyond the swamp is the old grown-over graveyard that my parents used to bring me to as a child.We choose to go in and visit our quieter neighbors; to rest on their stone walls for water and a snack.

As we do, Saoirse begins to wander among the tall weeds, pushing them aside to read the names carved into the rocks.Hamm.Hadsell.Becker.Her eyes light up.

“Mom!We know these names!”

The dates on the stones are all from the 1800s, but in my own life, I’ve known the family members of many of these people.

I remember wandering these back roads and hillsides as a teenager with Sanford, my surrogate grandfather and farming neighbor up the road, who’d stumble into these hidden places with me while we were out picking berries.He would use his cane to thwak away at the overgrowth, taking just a few minutes to restore a few graves and share a few stories about the deceased before pushing on to find more fruit for his pail.

I amble down the path and greet these old friends.And as I look carefully at each stone, I realize that while we can’t winthis battle, we are winning the war.The fact that I am standing here with my family on the solstice, loving these stones and this land, investing the entirety of my life into this community is evidence of that.Sanford’s grandfather was one of the original settlers of this town.He walked this place with me until I loved it so much, I could make my life nowhere else.And Bob and I walk this place with our daughters, instilling the same passion.

Saoirse is entitled to her anger.At fourteen, it is a manifestation of her love for our home.

“Saoirse!” I grab her arm as she catches up to me.“Do you see these stones?You’ll never find a Westchester here.”She gives me a sideways glance.I stumble forward, trying to make it all make sense for her.“People like the Westchesters come and go.But all these people stayed, and so many of their children stayed, because they all love this place.That’s howwe stop it.We love it.Look how many more people are here who have always loved this place compared to the people who trash it.”

I don’t think she’s listening. I leave her with her thoughts. But in my mind, I can tally how many Westchesters have come and gone during the forty-plus years I’ve called this town home.But so many of the names carved into the stones have stuck around, working day in and day out, always making things a little bit better, always keeping the natural world sacred.And slowly, this love of place becomes our culture.And that culture attracts newcomers who share that love.The destructive newcomers eventually burn themselves out.But the ones who fall in love stick around and make it home.And when people fall in love and around, time is on our side.

Saoirse links arms with me as we leave the graveyard and head back to the forested path.“I’m so glad we’re here,” her voice has softened, and the smile across her face is broad and true.She is suddenly loving her day.We find our way back to the woods, then hook around to come up the other side of Mallet pond.There, we stumble on an extensive trail of fishing line choking the passage and the saplings.Quietly, she works with Ula, Bob and me as we trace it out and remove it.We find the discarded bottles, and pack them away in our pack.The graveyard has melted everyone’s anger,replacing it with love and an eagerness to express it through cleaning and tending.

We return from our three days in the wilderness and I am happy for a hot shower and a soft bed.I’m also happy to lie underneath my windows, listening to the thrushes.And then, that night, just before I drift off to sleep, I hear it:

]]>http://kindredmedia.org/2018/07/bullfrogs-and-graveyards-on-a-sense-of-belonging/feed/0Voices Of Wisdom: Birth, Relationships And Renewal From Peruvian Mastershttp://kindredmedia.org/2018/07/voices-of-wisdom-birth-relationships-and-renewal-from-peruvian-masters/
http://kindredmedia.org/2018/07/voices-of-wisdom-birth-relationships-and-renewal-from-peruvian-masters/#respondSat, 07 Jul 2018 17:48:40 +0000http://kindredmedia.org/?p=21539“Anthropology gives us insights into how relational experiences and communication patterns within different cultures directly shape the development of the mind,” wrote Daniel J. Siegel in his book The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are. As a Western woman given the unique and rare opportunity of integrating with […]

As a Western woman given the unique and rare opportunity of integrating with an indigenous family from the Q’ero tribe, I can sincerely attest to Siegel’s statement. Q’ero descend from their Inkan ancestors in the Peruvian Andes, where I lived between 2009 and 2011, and hold the special lineage of Inkan initiation. Their culture and traditions remained nearly in tact for many centuries after the Spanish Inquisition, a remarkable feat attributed to extra sensory guidance from their ancestors, lineage masters, and profound connection with Nature.

In his chapter that introduced the field of study known as Interpersonal Neurobiology, Siegel discussed how mind emerges from both the entire neural system as well as communication patterns in relationships. After reading, I began contemplating the importance of renewing interpersonal relationships in order to keep one’s neurological system fresh and evolving. Q’ero have several nature-based methods for doing so, including the exchange of coca leaves between family and friends, ceremony, and initiation. The key element is Nature.

Unfortunately, this element has been deficient in modern and technocratic societies. Yet forces of Nature alone birth our children no matter the extent of medical intervention used during labor. Ask any birthing person — the majority will undoubtedly be able to express a connection with all people who have birthed throughout time. The identity a birthing person may experience with the timeless lineage of all birthing people clearly illustrates a nature-based renewal process.

The communication patterns of Q’ero are in direct relationship with their environment. Every geographical feature, all plants and animals (humans included), and their Quechua language are composed of kawsay, translated as living energy. Kawsay is communicable through telepathy, sensory experience, and verbal exchange. As I underwent initiation in their lineage, kawsay pacha, translated as world of living energy, became accessible and at times directly experienceable.

Multiple families from Q’ero gather for a renewal ceremony

Oftentimes during ceremony, I experienced kawsay as silk-like threads composed of fine winds, like an internal breath that calms and restores. I’ve felt these threads when bonding with infants. Kawsay appears to be formless, potential accessible through the lineage with many layers of subtlety. It is the initiate’s purpose to access unformed potential and birth it into being through the pathways laid out by their ancestors. By following in the footsteps of their ancestors, I felt very safe opening to the world of living energy.

Kawsay exists everywhere and at all times in various grades, from refined and subtle to dense and hard. For example, conflict between members of a community are characterized by density. There are special processes for establishing connections with refined kawsay that renew the relation between those in conflict. Without a renewal process, interpersonal relationships become evermore dense; that density is passed from one generation to the next.

Sound familiar? My mother birthed me at a hospital in Evanston, Illinois and requested an epidural without knowing the affects. When her bottom half went numb, she became anxiety and fear-stricken. She had relational tensions with my father, did not know the male ob-gyn on call, and had a lengthy history of abuse and neglect stemming from her own intrauterine experiences shaped by her alcoholic mother.

In 1984, the year I was born, my own ancestors were in for a surprise! Perhaps it was orchestrated by benevolent angels seeking healing for my lineage (my mother’s side are Irish Catholic). However it came about, I was born through dense layers of perpetuated trauma and somehow retained some semblance of awareness. However, as I grew I gradually became disconnected and disillusioned without a sense of purpose. Like a time capsule waiting to be found, a book on Tibetan Buddhism made it into my hands at age 18 that sparked my renewal journey.

Q’ero taught me that renewal occurs all the time, and that as human stewards of our environments, we have a responsibility to the organic process. It is our responsibility to ensure that renewal stays on track by birthing our future generations through sacred pathways laid out by our ancestors. Birth is a sacred and ceremonial act. With every birth there is an opportunity to sustain awareness of the naturally occurring renewal process. When parents are aware, bonding is strengthened and the newborn as well as the entire lineage benefits.

How is it possible to sustain awareness and renew our relations without time-tested cultural practices, especially in the case of pregnancy and parenting? In Western societies there is an immense amount of available information on cultural practices from around the globe. There are also highly developed fields of study that contribute theoretical frameworks and experiential methods of Western renewal processes. Below I list three simple and effective methods for renewal based on my experiences with the Peruvian wisdom tradition and my professional training in transpersonal psychology.

1) Immerse yourself in nature.

Begin this practice by establishing a threshold, literally a boundary that you create or imagine (for example, the space between two trees). Before crossing the threshold, set an intention and write it down. Decide on a length of time for your journey and set a timer, or don’t use a timer and follow your intuition. Take a few moments to center and ground yourself, then cross your threshold. Once you’re on the other side of your threshold, you’re in a transitory and liminal space. Explore your environment as you choose, noticing the reflections Nature offers you. At any point you may sit, walk, run, listen, smell, etc.. When your timer goes off, return to your threshold and cross from the opposite side in which you began. Journal, write poetry, or make art immediately afterward. If you choose not to use a timer, I encourage you to take a little more time for exploration after your initial sense of culmination. I’ve found that the extra amount of time often reveals some of my more profound insights. This can be done by yourself, with a partner or a group. Please be sure that you are in a familiar and safe place before embarking on a journey, where your threshold is easily accessible. Thanks to John Davis, Ph.D. for initiating me into this practice during my graduate studies at Naropa University.

2) Receive support and bodywork from a trained healer.

When I was traveling with my Q’ero family, I was conducting individual healings called mesa limpia (translated as cleansing). Today I offer Body-Centered Psychotherapy, an integration of craniosacral and regressive therapy. The body profoundly stores trauma – what Q’ero may consider density. Through gentle and non-invasive touch alongside skillful communication of emotional experience, whole body healing and transformation is achievable.

For anyone seeking renewal through bonding with their unborn, healing birth or ancestral trauma, or recalling perinatal experiences, I suggest finding a somatic therapist that specializes in pre- and perinatal psychology. Group processes focusing on the same are also available and include Dr. Ray Castellino’s Womb Surround, and Dr. Stanislav Grof and Christina Grof’s Holotropic Breathwork. Oftentimes professionals local to you may offer their own group support and bodywork processes. A benefit of group process is that you can attend with your partner, family, and friends. Thanks to the Association for Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health and to Sandy Morningstar, M.A. for teaching me perinatal tools during my postgraduate studies.

3) Participate in a ceremony.

There is a fortuitous abundance of available cultural practices in Western communities including meditation, yoga, tai chi, and pranayama. Empowerments facilitated by

Buddhist lamas are readily available across the United States and other countries. Hindu saints travel around the world offering blessings. Indigenous and Native peoples make certain cultural practices available to non-native peoples. Revival movements in Judaism, Christianity and Druidry offer connection with the sacred through ceremony and ritual. Your own cultural background may already have a renewal practice. Many Westerners have co-opted traditional practices that may benefit you on a personal level, such as a Mother Blessing (formerly Blessingway, a Navajo tradition used by Westerners in place of a baby shower).

You may also find community new or full moon circles in your area. Use discernment in locating a ceremony by inquiring into the community and its practices beforehand – do an internet search and ask multiple people if there is a concern for safety. Thanks to don Humberto Quispe Soncco and doña Bernardina Apaza Flores of Q’eros for teaching me that happy and loving community nourishes, restores, and renews.

Q’ero taught me everything I know about Nature. They taught me that it is possible to change rigid structures in my mind into fluid communication patterns. I am truly humbled to be my own example of transformational power. May the practices and information mentioned in this article benefit you in your renewal journey.

]]>http://kindredmedia.org/2018/07/voices-of-wisdom-birth-relationships-and-renewal-from-peruvian-masters/feed/0Ending Patriarchyhttp://kindredmedia.org/2018/06/ending-patriarchy/
http://kindredmedia.org/2018/06/ending-patriarchy/#commentsThu, 28 Jun 2018 21:17:22 +0000http://kindredmedia.org/?p=21506Caption: Protesters with sign denouncing the “patriarchy” in the society during the “Women’s March on Washington” to protest against Trump presidency on January 21, 2017 in Toronto, Canada. Photo by Shutterstock/arindambanerjee “Rather than a means to an end, patriarchy is an end in itself, and the most serious threat to public health that the world […]

]]>Caption: Protesters with sign denouncing the “patriarchy” in the society during the “Women’s March on Washington” to protest against Trump presidency on January 21, 2017 in Toronto, Canada. Photo by Shutterstock/arindambanerjee

“Rather than a means to an end, patriarchy is an end in itself,

and the most serious threat to public health that the world has ever known.”

— Robert Hartman

Editor’s Note: A new survey shows the United States now ranks in the top ten most dangerous nations for women. The survey by the Thomson Reuters Foundation of about 550 experts in women’s issues around the globe labeled the U.S. the 10th most dangerous nation in terms of the risk of sexual violence, harassment and being coerced into sex. The foundation asked the experts which of the 193 United Nations member states they felt were “most dangerous for women and which country was worst in terms of health care, economic resources, cultural or traditional practices, sexual violence and harassment, non-sexual violence and human trafficking,” according to the foundation’s article on the survey. The United States is the only Western country on the list. See the study here.

Naming The Problem

Starting a conversation about the horrendous consequences of 7,000 years of patriarchy with most anyone is, at best, like trying to start a campfire in the rain. When I talk with other men informally about patriarchy, a rare few give me a knowing smile and a nod. Mainly though, after a couple of awkward seconds, his eyes glaze over and he has a “deer in the headlight” moment before his shoulders slump forward; I wonder if he wants to plead, “But I never raped anyone!”

Some say, “that’s just how men are; they will never change”. A significant minority of men insist that malehood is in trouble only because women have too much power already. I find it interesting that, despite the denials that men are the problem, many folks – women and men alike – still want to know how to stop the violence. Since men cause 98% of the violence world-wide, this is a tacit admission that men are, in fact, the problem.

The number of American troops killed in Afghanistan and Iraq between 2001 and 2012 was 6,488. The number of American women who were murdered by current or ex male partners during that time was 11,766. That’s nearly double the amount of casualties lost during war.

Domestic violence is not a singular incident, it’s an insidious problem deeply rooted in our culture — and these numbers prove that.

The percentage of financial abuse that occurs in all domestic violence cases. The number one reason domestic violence survivors stay or return to the abusive relationship is because the abuser controls their money supply, leaving them with no financial resources to break free.

The number of LGBT people murdered by their intimate partners in 2013. Fifty percent of them were people of color. This is the highest documented level of domestic violence homicide in the LGBT community in history.

The percentage of physical assaults perpetrated against women that are reported to the police annually.

Indeed: how do we deal with these careening bulls who threaten to pull down civilization?

Forming The Question

After almost a half-century as a health-care professional, I became curious about this “problem” and the obvious connection between men and the extreme violence I witnessed in various ERs and operating rooms. Later in my career, I counseled families and individuals, both in agency and private practice and found that overall, a majority admitted to serious abuses at the hands of a male partner, family member or caregiver, generally a man in a position of trust.

25 years of NICHD brain-behavior research documenting how early sensory deprivation, abuse and neglect patterns the brain for a lifetime of depression and violence.

Wherever I looked at different cultures – American, European, Middle Eastern, Russian, South American – I found that roughly the same statistic emerged: men commit extremely violent acts everywhere, and not just in the community with guns and knives, but they are also wantonly laying waste to the environment, taking food away from children, destroying healthcare and inflicting entirely unnecessary suffering everywhere.

After four years of focused research and writing about the history, ancient and modern, of violence and conflict, I turned to the fields of psycho-history, neuroscience, brain development, epigenetics, and early childhood learning to understand what is ‘Eating Men’. Combining this new scientific knowledge with my experience in diverse aspects of healthcare and my clinical practice in counseling psychology, I finally saw the “blizzard before the snow’”.

Psychologists and psychotherapists frequently view the family as a system. When one member of that system begins to “misbehave” in some way, very often another member of the system supports the negative behavior. When I considered that the “wizards” behind ecological catastrophe, stunning cruelty and massive population trauma are 98% male, I came to realize that for such extreme and toxic androcentric assumptions to flourish for the past 5-7000 years, something must be reinforcing it, supporting it.

My own “ah-ah” moment came when I realized that patriarchy is just a container in which to hide the toxic parts of our human selves.Directly and indirectly, patriarchy is a system of totalitarian control that supports and promotes the conditions — like racism, scapegoating, climate warming and unregulated gun ownership — absolute prerequisites for violence and chaos to erupt. Patriarchy is an umbrella term under which culture, capitalism and its other elements are mere “shell corporations” of male control. Rather than a means to an end, patriarchy is an end in itself, and the most serious threat to public health that the world has ever known.

To truly understand what patriarchy is about you need to get into an unhappy mood. A miserable frame of mind. A place where no one knows who you are. A place where your cries of hunger and abuse go unheard. A place where being vulnerable is dangerous and you walk alone. Exile. Separate. But that’s not all. If I haven’t made the point well enough: patriarchy is both implicit and explicit in everything we do, what we wear, what we believe in, what our roles are, what not to do, who to love. All of it. It is our Old Story of Separation from Life.

Marry that to patriarchy’s history of obsession with conflict and suffering, by which it sustains itself, and who would hesitate to shout out from the highest towers and demand that men stop putting their legislative hands on women’s bodies, stop producing radioactive waste that is poisonous for millions of year, stop creating endocrine disruptors, stop raping women and stop having sex with your daughters, stop waging endless wars, and even insist men quit their jobs in the oil industry or at Smith & Wesson. Stop destroying the future!

We must demand that men WAKE UP and stop working out our lack of early nurturing and the fear that is epidemic in a death-worshipping, war-loving culture. Despite the violence that literally rocks cradles around the world, most cultures go on praising their narcissistic bullies as saviors, and it is alarmingly unpopular, if not dangerous, to claim that we MEN are the problem.

Maybe it’s a “claim too far”, but it’s obvious to me that we must re-assess how men actually function in society. In light of men’s historically catastrophic abuses of power, a question begs to be asked: in what ways have patriarchal-inspired stressors, intrauterine trauma, the pressure to be the ‘right kind’ of boy, toxic shame and rage at our own vulnerabilities create a practice of masculinity that is so toxic as to make him, for a generation or two at least, exactly the wrong type of candidate for any position of power?

Growing Up Male

Growing up male is a complex river of tides, unseen cultural, political and biologic forces, and harsh socio-economic factors. Not the least of which are the four laws of a patriarchal manhood: stoicism, homophobia, aggression and misogyny. The biological roots of male vulnerability include environmentally triggered, intrauterine stress that causes an untimely release of the stress hormone cortisol.

Be Worried About Boys, Especially Baby Boys: A Three Part Series by Darcia Narvaez, PhD

Cells in the process of dividing are especially vulnerable. Male fetal cells divide more rapidly than a girls. As a result, the boy child is naturally and exquisitely sensitive to stress in the womb. Cortisol, while essential for development when it is released at the proper time, is poisonous to rapidly dividing, first trimester fetal brain cells. The post-natal period of brain development and attachment is also key, because it is there that the ‘young man’ gets his first taste of love and acceptance, as is his due, or shame and isolation, which will be his (and our) undoing.

Ironically, from the start of the history they themselves wrote, we men have shown ourselves to be the truest and most reliable victims of our own appalling snares; and frequently, because of unrelenting confusion, betrayal and fear, we go berserk.

It’s a hardscrabble road from boyhood innocence to suicide bomber, from summer in his pocket to unbearable narcissism and despair. What’s worse than that? A boy isn’t even allowed to complain about it. Stoicism is a scar on childhood. Stoicism creates isolation that can force a child to walk alone in darkness.

When, as a result of patriarchal rules, we have called a boy ‘weak’ for expressing feelings of fear or sadness, or mocked him because he was different, we’ve essentially murdered his spirit and transplanted a culturally-created toxic virus that hijacks the operating system of a child. In the years to come he will call it “demon”. The karmic results are the same: not only are we men primarily responsible for almost everything that’s gone wrong, but ironically we’re doing it, not because we are bad or evil, we’re doing it because we’ve been operating from a deep well of sadness and shame at our innate vulnerability, which is rooted in human prehistory, male biology, and the unique particulars of the male’s response to trauma.

Exploring the nexus of men’s biologic vulnerability with the stressful demands that patriarchy places on men, I have found that across man’s lifespan and cultures, living up to patriarchy’s expectations can be as deadly as a heart attack. The recipe for making a man starts in the womb (perhaps even before), but after birth the cultural injunctions to ‘be a man’ are so tone-deaf to the realities, needs and wonder of being a boy that in place of a childhood, he gets Hell on Earth instead. Right from the ‘git-go’, from conception, we are simply not ‘built’ to tolerate stress as well as females.

Any child is harmed by abuse and neglect, but male fetuses, male babies, male toddlers, male children and male teens are especially vulnerable to hardship. Boys are handicapped if they don’t get the loving care they need early on. Without it, he starts out a day late and a dollar short. Since we don’t see the brutality of patriarchal control as the cause, our social structures are unable to evolve in a way that provides the ‘special protections’ that all boys need, absolutely. As a result, we are still harming boys by trying to “toughen” them up, and sadly, most boys will never fully recover. Their natural development is waylaid and changed forever; they carry their wounds into manhood and, at best, men have shorter lives than women, punctuated by a greater risk of accidental death, suicide, disease and disability. For too many, the trajectory of male life follows the Hobbsian arc: “short, brutish and nasty”.

Ending Patriarchy

But what, anyone could rightly ask, is being done about it? Not Much. Although it’s a great start, we seem to think that passing legislation outlawing behaviors that patriarchy implicitly encourages is enough. That a slap on the wrist, some cell time, bankruptcy and ruin, a little public shaming would scare anyone straight. Yet, no matter how pugilistic we are against offenders like Weinstein and dozens (would-be-billions) of other men, if we hope that legal actions like this will change the way men think about women – hope again. No law can ever heal the root cause of misogyny, racism, greed, religious fundamentalism, and environmental chaos. These are the same old tools, albeit with some new names, that patriarchy has used for millennia to “stir the pot”, to keep conflict in motion. If laws had this kind of power, we wouldn’t need such laws and regulations in the first place.

March for Moms, #MeToo, Birth Trauma, And Ending Medical Model Patriarchy: An Exclusive Kindred Interview, Download and Transcript Available

Arguably, it might be said that what the rule of law attempts to address, or more likely cover up, are the fundamental fault lines of human nature that patriarchy has cracked open through one privation or another. Put another way, our failings as a patriarchal driven society to properly serve boy’s early needs, and as parents and communities, to properly protect and nurture them. We must take into account that all life strives towards wholeness or goodness; and we must pass laws that protect THAT, far beyond the accumulation of power and wealth. We must encourage boys’ general welfare in such a way as to make “it-takes-a-village” model more useful than the sound byte it has become.

Yet, out of fear, denial or apathy (or the ‘horror’ of such village intimacy?) we soft-shoe stage right or left and are content with mudslinging, demonizing every group our leaders have told us we should be afraid of. We create demons and scofflaws of anyone who feels like “other”. We allow Trump to deport people, responsible fathers and mothers, who have been in the US for 20, 30, 40 years. There is a law in physics that for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction. So while patriarchy is busy making “other” out of decent human beings, in the eyes of others we are the American demon. Who can tell one demon from the other? Not me. I just see demons begetting demons, never justice, never peace.

It’s either too much government, or too little, but by any name, if you follow the signatures of family, environmental, social, and religious upheavals, you will invariably find that a destructive, self-serving patriarchy is at the center of virtually every manmade catastrophe. The list of crimes that toxic hyper-masculinity have perpetrated worldwide for seven millennia come mostly under the heading of ‘Crimes Against Humanity’. Yet, the idea that men and patriarchal ideology and systems are responsible for the planetary killing mess we are facing is still viewed as pure ‘rubbish’, if not gender heresy. Of course, that’s what we can expect from a system of control that has had 7,000 years to develop, 7,000 years to adapt and 7,000 years to really get inside your head.

How could something so outrageous and harmful go unnoticed for so long? Feminist, Adrienne Rich, wrote in Of Woman Born 40+ years ago, that men’s power is hard to see because “it permeates everything”. Of course, this implies that patriarchy is right here in front of us, but cleverly hidden within the sheer ordinariness of yet another school shooting, and entirely dependent on our willingness to allow violent conflict and suffering to be normal.

The vastness of patriarchal space makes it difficult to find an edge you can get your thumb under and peel a bit of it away; discovering where you begin and where self fades into communal blackness is a valuable pursuit in any search for meaning. Patriarchy is everything we can think of, right down to the Happy Meal you bought your son at McDonalds, which is another way of saying that consumerism is just one of the many tentacles of patriarchy that emboldens the male shadow-spirit to conflate a calorie-laden, tropical forest clearcutter, ecologic devastator, land-fill-filler, heart-hurting diet with happiness.

Hunger is good for patriarchy and it’s good for business, so it is a central doctrine that we should want ‘more’. As one commercial demands, “Obey Your Thirst!” After all, if hunger is good for the economy, then it’s flag-waving patriotic.

Patriarchy likes you unhappy because unhappy, hungry people buy more stuff than happy, satisfied people. This kind of consumerism is a blizzard of manufactured, unmet needs that depend on unrequited hunger.

Sadly, since there is no permanent satisfaction possible anywhere, outside of cocaine maybe, like Monsanto shareholders, few men of the patriarch will ever desire less.

So we are back at the beginning, the part of the discussion that deserves real conversation because the answer to, “How do we fix it?” is really messy.

The short answer: IT’S THE WRONG QUESTION!

Healing The Male Heart

In AA we often talk about the “gifts of sobriety” such as improved relationships. Some of my early “gifts”, much to my despair, were anger and resentment. This is really normal stuff for the early path, because sobriety allowed me to be present enough to feel the anger for the first time. Inevitably, I came to ask, “Why is it that I’m sober, but my life is still a drunken mess?” And the equally inevitable reply: addiction is a symptom, and my life being a mess, a manifestation of something wounded at the level of my most basic self, far deeper and more unexplored than I could imagine.

Is A Primal Wound Driving You To Addiction? Is suffering a necessary part of the human condition? Is it species normal for individuals to feel anxious—like impending doom, a fear of intimacy, or a sense of falseness and meaninglessness? Part one of a seven part series.

Simply stated, my life had been such a blizzard of unmet need that I didn’t understand, that I tripped over the demands of hundreds of patriarchal chains strewn across my path. Twenty-four sober years later, I can appreciate my naiveté because I didn’t see the huge paradox that loomed over those first sober years that made my early questions and doubts irrelevant: my drinking had nothing to do with alcohol.

In a similar way (hang on), the possession of an assault rifle has nothing to do with protection or safety. They both cover up those deep fault lines of male vulnerability. Every addict learns to “protect” their supply. An unregulated gun market and the 2nd amendment serve to do just that: to provide unrestricted access to a gun enthusiast’s ‘DOC’ – drug of choice – in this case, weapons of mass destruction. There are many DOC’s out there: food, sex, gambling, video games, just to skim a few off the top, and all highly resistant to change.

However, the “Father of all DOC’s” is Patriarchy.

Wherever patriarchy thrives, the privileges that membership confer, like the ‘right’ to dominate and terrorize those you are suppose to serve, to interpret the Earth and Women as commodities to consume and regulate, to decide who deserves to thrive and who deserves to barely cope, who gets a living wage and who doesn’t, who has sovereignty over their bodies and who doesn’t. It is rightly said that those who demand power over others have the least access to authentic inner power themselves.

Feeling powerful or arrogant or “chosen”, that grand cosmic joke of control, is a narcotic; and like any DOC, we never have to feel what we don’t want to feel, face what we don’t want to face. It’s his denial of men’s innate vulnerabilities that’s been at the root of everything that’s been wrong for 7,000 years.

So, if the important question remains, “What Do We Do About Men?”, then the only answer possible lies not in creating more demons, more surveillance, higher border walls, more prisons, bigger guns or more laws. Paradoxically, even women’s “salvation” lies not within a global #MeToo Movement, it lies within something even more radical: a change in the male heart.

]]>http://kindredmedia.org/2018/06/ending-patriarchy/feed/2“Government-Sanctioned Child Abuse”: Border Separationhttp://kindredmedia.org/2018/06/government-sanctioned-child-abuse/
http://kindredmedia.org/2018/06/government-sanctioned-child-abuse/#respondMon, 18 Jun 2018 01:12:21 +0000http://kindredmedia.org/?p=21472CAPTION: DETROIT, MICHIGAN – JUNE 14, 2018: Protestors display multi-lingual signs at the protest to Keep Families Together in Detroit. (Spanish on sign translates to: “Families United, not Divided”). Photo by Shutterstock/Stephanie Kenner Government officials are doing irreparable harm to families seeking asylum. They are separating children from their families, no matter the age of the child. […]

She says: “Officials at the Department of Homeland Security claim they act solely ‘to protect the best interests of minor children.'”

Hardly.

Is it ignorance or malice? We don’t know, but the justifications sound both ignorant and malicious.

What ignorance are they displaying? Here is a short description:

Make America’s Children Healthy Again, a two part series

Human children are not like other animals. They are born so immature they look like fetuses of other animals till about 18 months of age. In the first years of life, children co-construct their biological and social capacities, organizing their basic features around the experiences they have. The norms for our species is the evolved nest. One specific need that separation denies is physical affection from known caregivers. This need among social mammals like us was well documented by Harry Harlow’s monkey experiments. Young monkeys deprived of their mother’s touch developed into aggressive and socially awkward individuals, never to recover.

Extensive distress shifts development, undermining what otherwise develops in a loving supportive environment–biologically healthy systems and social engagement. Instead extensive distress enhances primitive survival mechanisms in ways that grow to harm self and others—e.g., the stress response becomes hyperreactive. Because the first years of life are so sensitive to experience, the individual may never recover to reach their full potential (although they may recover enough to survive—i.e., what is often called “resilience”).

Early life stress and undercare lead to underdeveloped or misdeveloped adults. We should not be surprised that US adults make such bad, insensitive decisions, based on their own experience and lack of education.

Is the policy malicious? Yes, that too. The fear mongering promoted by current politicians—e.g., that refugees are dangerous—makes it seem logical that you “manage” the borders in any way to keep the insiders safe.

Shonkoff, J.P., & Phillips, D.A. (Eds.) (2000). From neurons to neighborhoods: The science of early childhood development (Board on Children, Youth, and Families, National Research Council and Institute of Medicine). Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.

]]>http://kindredmedia.org/2018/06/government-sanctioned-child-abuse/feed/0Make America’s Children Great Again, Part 2: Affectionhttp://kindredmedia.org/2018/06/make-americas-children-great-again-part-2-affection/
http://kindredmedia.org/2018/06/make-americas-children-great-again-part-2-affection/#respondSun, 10 Jun 2018 22:22:05 +0000http://kindredmedia.org/?p=21474Human babies (at full term birth) look and act like fetuses for about 18 months! Yes, it is a shock. A baby should be in the womb that much longer to grow what is needed to be able to move around the world like other newborn animals who can feed themselves shortly after birth. A […]

Human babies (at full term birth) look and act like fetuses for about 18 months! Yes, it is a shock. A baby should be in the womb that much longer to grow what is needed to be able to move around the world like other newborn animals who can feed themselves shortly after birth. A fetus still has much to grow before they are ready to face the world and for humans part of “fetal development” happens after birth in the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth trimesters. It’s not just the body that grows bigger. Most importantly, a human baby’s head grows enormously during those 18 months, the biggest reason for an early exit from the womb.

Winner of the William James Book Award from the American Psychological Association in 2015

In reports about children’s health by international organizations, affectionate touch is often not discussed. I think this is because it is not an issue in developing countries where concerns about child health are typically focused. Developing nations still offer their babies many of the characteristics of the evolved nest, including affection.

In my lectures, I show pictures of young children’s average experiences in preindustrial societies and the USA. The first set of photos show young children being held most of the time, carried in arms or wraps. The photos from the USA show how children typically spend much of every 24 hours — isolated in playpens, carriers, strollers, or cribs.

Why is physical affection, or positive touch, so important? Touch has significant effects on a growing brain and body. Here are a few examples.

(2) Skin to skin contact with infants is especially valuable. It promotes healthy sleep cycles, adaptive behavioral arousals, exploratory activities, social and cognitive functioning (Field, 1995; James McKenna). It also helps parents early on tune into their infant’s signals so they can be responsive to needs and communications. This is another key factor for optimizing children’s normal development.

For example, Meaney and colleagues have shown that a rat pup who does not have high nurturing touch in the first 10 days misses the time period for “turning on” genes related to controlling anxiety for the rest of life. As a result, whenever something new comes up, the offspring becomes anxious—unless drugs are given. The equivalent time period for turning on such genes is the first 6 months of life, when in our 2 million years of evolutionary history babies would have been carried and in touch with caregivers 24/7.

(5) Cosleeping (safely) helps a baby learn to regulate breathing and other systems (Mckenna, 2008). In fact, safe bedsharing and breastfeeding (breastsleeping) are an evolutionary inheritance that optimizes infant growth and wellbeing. (For guidance on safe cosleeping and bedsharing see James McKenna’s website.)

References

Gale, C.R., O’Callaghan, F.J., Bredow, M., Martyn, C.N., & Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children Study Team (2006). The Influence of head growth in fetal life, infancy, and childhood on intelligence at the ages of 4 and 8 years. Pediatrics, 118(4), 1486-1492.

]]>http://kindredmedia.org/2018/06/make-americas-children-great-again-part-2-affection/feed/0MilkDrunk, A Play: The “Vagina Monologues” For Breastfeeding Debuts On Stagehttp://kindredmedia.org/2018/04/21311/
http://kindredmedia.org/2018/04/21311/#commentsThu, 26 Apr 2018 15:08:00 +0000http://kindredmedia.org/?p=21311“MilkDrunk is to breastfeeding what The Vagina Monologues is to women’s sexuality: a curtain-ripping revelation on a world hidden in plain sight. MilkDrunk’s unflinching honesty, passion, humor and love bypasses our enculturated taboos and mythologies around birth, breasts and bonding as a brilliant, modern wisdom teaching with the potential to relieve future mothers and fathers from the […]

“MilkDrunk is to breastfeeding what The Vagina Monologues is to women’s sexuality: a curtain-ripping revelation on a world hidden in plain sight. MilkDrunk’s unflinching honesty, passion, humor and love bypasses our enculturated taboos and mythologies around birth, breasts and bonding as a brilliant, modern wisdom teaching with the potential to relieve future mothers and fathers from the burden of asking, ‘Why didn’t anyone tell me this?’ O’Malley’s play is timely and needed as the United States struggles to address its maternal health care system, lack of paid parental leave and pressure on unwitting new parents to face the Bio-Cultural Conflict in isolation.” — Lisa Reagan, Kindred

About the Play

Please support our 20 year old, award-winning, nonprofit work to Share the New Story of Childhood, Parenthood and the Human Family.

Listen to playwright and actor Cathleen O’Malley share insights into her new play, MilkDrunk, that traces a year in the life of a first time, full-time, exclusively breastfeeding mother. A frank, funny, and physical solo performance, Milkdrunk pulls back the (damp) curtain on childbirth, breastfeeding and what it means to be a mammal in 2018. It illuminates a path that is both universal and cloaked in infinite mystery—one littered with laughter, tears, and drops of Liquid Gold. Milkdrunk was first presented through Cleveland Public Theatre’s Test Flight Series, a new play development program.

About The Playwright

Cathleen is a theatre director, performer, writer, educator, voiceover artist, and creator of original work. She is a graduate of the London International School of Performing Arts (LISPA), where she trained in Lecoq-based physical theatre, movement, mask and mime under the pedagogical direction of Thomas Prattki and Amy Russell. Cathleen has created and performed with companies regionally and abroad, including Akropolis Performance Lab, Relax Your Face (co-founder), Zany Umbrella Circus, Touchstone Theatre, Talespinner Children’s Theatre, and with inmates of the Washington State Corrections Center for Women through Freehold’s Engaged Theatre Project. From 2013-2017, Cathleen was the Director of Audience Engagement and Media Relations at Cleveland Public Theatre and was recently seen onstage in a workshop production of her whimsical original play Noonday, created with Lauren Joy Fraley and Renee Schilling. Cathleen holds an MFA from Naropa University.

MilkDrunk photo by Bob Perkowski

MilkDrunk, A Play: The “Vagina Monologues” for Breastfeeding

THE TRANSCRIPT FROM THE INTERVIEW

LISA REAGAN: Welcome to Kindred Media, an alternative media and non-profit initiative of Kindred World. This is Lisa Reagan and I have a real treat for you today. I am talking with Cathleen O’Malley, a theatre director, performer, writer, educator, voice-over artist, and graduate of the London International School of Performing Arts. Cathleen is also the playwright of the new one woman show “MilkDrunk” performed as a workshop production on stage at the Cleveland Public Theatre Test Flight series this month. “MilkDrunk” does for breastfeeding what “Vagina Monologues” did for women’s sexuality, in my opinion: it lays bare a hidden-in-plain-sight world. So, welcome, Cathleen.

CATHLEEN O’MALLEY: Thank you so much for having me.

LISA REAGAN: I have to say, I started reading your script. I have not seen the play, although I look forward to seeing it and you had me at placenta cooler.

CATHLEEN O’MALLEY: Yeah.

LISA REAGAN: And over and over again throughout the play. It is just marvelous. It is amazingly well written and hilarious and funny and an emotional rollercoaster and just totally captures. So I think it is going to take a lot of people back to what it was like to make that shift, which is what we had talked about before, this shift between what we thought we were going to be prepared for with a mind intellect pre-baby and then the body kicks in post baby. It’s just a tremendous work.

CATHLEEN O’MALLEY: Thank you so much. Yes, the biggest, the feedback that I keep getting from people who I talk to about the show and the inspiration for the show and then people who have seen it, there’s this recurring refrain of, “They don’t tell you that! They don’t tell you that! How could this be the thing that bonds us all?” If nothing else, the experience of birth bonds us all as humans and how could there still be so much information that comes as a surprise to new parents. That really is in a lot of ways the motivation for writing the piece and sharing it with the world.

LISA REAGAN: It is. So the description of “MilkDrunk” is it traces a year in the life of a first time, full time, exclusive breastfeeding mother and it pulls back this curtain on childbirth, breastfeeding and what it means to be a mammal in 2018. It illuminates a path that is both universal and cloaked in infinite mystery, one littered with laughter, tears, and drops of liquid gold, which of course is the breastfeeding reference.

CATHLEEN O’MALLEY: Yeah.

On Being A Mammal In 2018: The Bio-Cultural Conflict

LISA REAGAN: What it means to be a mammal in 2018, I mean, that defines a lot of work and fields of science that come under the conscious parenting movement for the last 40 years have attempted to address in our culture and in our medical model systems. So your play achieves I think in this way that probably nothing else can except for art. We so need social change and art is like yourself, but to help people access this information in a way that is fun and illuminating, educational, and intense emotionally during this play. You want to tell me a little bit about, it seems like it must have just started popping into your head immediately and I think you’ve said that to me before that this play started writing itself right away when you had a baby.

Read a review: UnLatched: The Evolution of Breastfeeding and the Making of a Controversy, by Jennifer Grayson, explores her and the nation’s experience with infant formula.

CATHLEEN O’MALLEY: Yeah I think it’s strange because I’m a theatre artist and somebody who creates my own work, I’ve mostly worked in an ensemble model, so working alongside other people to collaboratively create work that is then performed as a group. So doing a solo show has been one of these, as an actor, one of these bucket list items. It’s pretty crazy and somewhat ironic that it was the very thing that I had been fearing, which is motherhood, that I was fearing would completely derail my career. That has been the inciting incident to launch what has now become my first solo show and something that I really couldn’t be more proud of.

So to answer your question about the origin, so I was literally in my gown, in the hospital bed, checking in with the outside world when I realized that I was going to be retelling and retelling my birth story over and over again. People were curious. The women in my life in particular were very curious and as I was retelling, I realized that details were either sharpening in my memory or falling away with each retelling, so I took the occasion right there, I think it was my second day in the hospital. I just started tapping out the details, anything I could possibly remember, words that were said, sensations, into a little document that I had on my bedside mobile phone and then over the following 10-12 months, this document grew into what later became the outline for the show.

So it was very very early on when I realized there was something so tremendous, such a tremendous change and that there were things that I would experiencing physically and emotionally that I, as a writer and a performer, I wanted to document for myself. The more I got to talking about these experiences and the more I started reaching out to my community for help, particularly around breastfeeding, I realized that there were many details that many of us were sort of unaware of as we stumbled into those early months so that the reason for the play was also answering the void of information that so many women in my life were reflecting on.

LISA REAGAN: And the information you give them, the detail is stunning. Some of the description of different kinds of baby poop, did you know?

CATHLEEN O’MALLEY: They don’t tell you that.

LISA REAGAN: You’ve got to know these things. It’s really important to really keep an eye on baby poop and the way that your doctor would treat you when you would call in and have new parent anxiety because, hello, we don’t know these things. Is she breathing okay? And they just kind of go down a checklist and you’re still sitting there when you hang up with your hand on her chest to make sure she’s alive. It was just so very deeply compassionately written. I wanted to make sure that anyone listening who thinks that Cathleen has presented this in any kind of black and white pro-breastfeeding or co-sleeping or natural parenting or any of this, this is totally not true.

You go right to the heart of the truth, which is how complicated it is again to try to meet our own biological imperative in a culture that doesn’t support these. So the seriousness of looking at the complexity of what we’re expected to do and the lack of support, you just nail it over and over again, to the point of it turns out to be almost a wisdom teaching by the time you’re at the end. Like, oh wow, there’s so much wisdom here because you don’t take a stand. It’s just, here’s what happened. And it’s hilarious and touching.

CATHLEEN O’MALLEY: That means so much to hear that because really you and other mothers and parents, I include the dads in this, really are the number one audience for this piece and as so many friends and elder women and women also in my peer group who have been a part of sharing their stories with me and their challenges and their mistakes in the development of the piece, all of these women, this collective wisdom, has a place in the show and it was really important to me and my director,Elaine Feagler, who worked very very close with me in the development of the piece to really honor that variety of perspective in that we are all just trying to make it work.

We are all in a grand improvisation and hopefully this is really communicated in the show, that me as the protagonist, again and again, I try something, it doesn’t work. I try something new. I reach out. I am trying my best and hopefully that gives the space for people who come and see the show to have compassion for their own improvisation, their own triumphs and mistakes, and also for those who perhaps who haven’t, who aren’t parents themselves or don’t maybe have parents in their lives, hopefully it is also compassion building for them.

Using Humor To Address Terror: Social Change Artist Magic

LISA REAGAN: I think the humor is so lightening bolt on that it really helps to take apart any of this, the rigidity that we would like to believe that if you do it this way, you do it that way, but if you don’t and you go through a list and at one point. It really captures the insanity of advice giving in our culture. Really, it’s all conflicted. It’s not based on that person’s personal experience at that time and it’s very mechanistic based. It’s very do this and the baby will go to sleep or do that and then you have, as you do in the play, a mother going out to the garage to sit in the car and scream her head off.

BreastSLEEPING: Can A New Science-Based Holistic Concept Create Cultural Support And Resources For Parents?

CATHLEEN O’MALLEY: Yeah, there is a funny moment about that, well, a couple of things, just for the listeners, the opening line to this section of the show is essentially about the advice, it’s not really advice, it’s sort of just a phrase that sort of often tumbles out of people’s mouths. “You know babies, they don’t come with an instruction manual.” But what comes up in the show is that actually there are many many many resources that have taken the place of the single instruction manual and actually it is that total onslaught of information and advice and best practices that we’re sent home with from the hospital and then we pick up as soon as we engage with our in-laws that there is actually sometimes directly contradictory information provided from the hospital and the hospital staff and so the idea that we’re just overwhelmed with information is sort of a preceding part to this section of the show.

Where it ends up is yes, as you said Lisa, me, the actor playing myself me, screaming alone in my car in the garage where I have some privacy and just kind of letting it all out and trying to get to the bottom of that tension so that I can pick myself up and face another day. But what’s funny about that moment is myself and the director, who is also a mother, had to clarify for one of the designers on the show, who is a man who is married but doesn’t have kids himself.

There was a joke one day, we said, “Hey, just to be clear, there wasn’t just the one time I screamed.” We’re treating it as a dramatic climax in the show, but I have done this like thirty times, I don’t know. I will be doing it for the rest of my life, a version of letting it all hang out and some version of just turning that pressure relief dial. So that was one of the moments where a lot of mothers who saw the show came up afterwards and said, you know, get out of my head. That’s a moment that I had. You really spoke to that. That brought me great satisfaction that it gave voice to something that we all very very very much keep to ourselves.

LISA REAGAN: I am going to see this play, I really am. I look forward to having the feeling of watching your performance and the catharsis that’s going to come after this I’m sure that’s going to be there to see as you go through. I just can’t wait to see. I know you have some video that you’re going to share with Kindred eventually here and some photos from the play, but just going through the script and knowing as you said, this is a highly physical play, highly intense and just streamlined beautiful writing. I cannot wait to see this in action for myself. So can you speak a little bit to the physicality of the play? I think as an artist I would like to hear about that, as a theater person myself.

CATHLEEN O’MALLEY: Yeah, absolutely. So in the long tradition of solo performance, there is one approach, there’s an actor alone on stage with an object, and in my case, it’s me, myself, and a chair. That chair becomes the baby’s crib. It becomes the ubiquitous infant car seat with a handle. It becomes a couch at the lactation support group. It becomes a chair in the doctor’s office. It becomes the driver’s seat of my car and this and then many many other things. It becomes the baby actually, carried around on my back and many other things. So the technical elements of the show are very very simple from a set design perspective and what that opens up for me as a performer and as you mentioned on the introduction, my training is in physical theater, so what that means is that the mode of the actor in approaching text material includes the full use of the body. So it’s not that I’m dancing around the stage or walking on my hands, or maybe in the future iteration of the show, there could be those elements, it’s more that the use of the body communicates without any changes in costume or set the different locations and also the different characters that I play.

So I play myself, but I also play my pediatrician. I play a women on the airplane that I meet. I play the baby herself and many other things in the show. It’s the use of the body. It’s changes of the voice and then it is use also of the full stage and then transforming this object in my hands by the way that I place it, by the way that I hold it, by the care that I give to the object to communicate my world. I think for this show, what I’ve heard from the audience is that was really effective in sort of paring down the presentation of the show to the text, the writing, and the emotion. That said, there’s a very lush sound-scape. I worked with a sound designer named Brian Bacon who in addition to original music that underscores various parts of the show, he also used live recordings of some of my child toys, electronic toys, which if you’re a parent yourself you can know that’s the sound-scape of high pitched electronic singing toys could very well become part of the sound-scape of early parenthood if you let those kinds of things into your house, which I vowed I never would and then I did. Well, my daughter is very delighted by that. Then there are things like there are actual recordings from my labor that are incorporated into the sound-scape of the show as well. So the sound design has a transporting element to the show, as well as the lighting design which supports the changes in place and time.

LISA REAGAN: How did the audience react to the zingers? Because there are some really good zingers in here that I can imagine that there was some flinching on the part of some men. I just have to read this one zinger on latching, you say:

“I tell Matt (your husband), the best way to imagine it is to picture placing your dick in a door and slamming it every three to four hours or the baby starves. He was sympathetic before but I think that drove the point home.”

CATHLEEN O’MALLEY: Yeah. That line always gets a little sound in the audience. Which is fun! That’s also the opportunity presented by a solo work where you’re there in direct address to the audience, which is based on what the audience is giving back, I am allowed to kind of let that moment sit. I am allowed to give it a little accent with a little look or exchange a glance or a little shrug or a little oh, I know, do you feel that?

LISA REAGAN: Do you feel that?

CATHLEEN O’MALLEY: I know, you feel that? That’s the pleasure of the form to be there just me alone on stage directly addressing the audience and I think there’s also a lot delight there for the audience to feel that they’re being spoken to and sort of engaged in the collaboration and in the unfolding of the story. So that line, I will say though I must credit that to my friend Sarah, who is a mother of three, who her roots are in Tennessee. So she’s the person in my life who uses colorful terms of phrase and that statement was actually something she shared with me that I was given permission to use in the show, which is something that she said to her own husband upon the birth and the attempted breastfeeding of her third baby. So I credit Sarah and I thank her for that line. There are many many other lines and other insights in the show that were pulled from conversations that I had with these women and they were all sort of woven into the special acknowledgments of the so many mamas whose experience shared ended up creating a lot of the substance of the show.

Anchoring The Play: Ancestral Honoring

LISA REAGAN: I really appreciate how deep you go into this idea of mothers and motherhood in the show. You talk about going to see your grandmother when you were pregnant and she was in hospice and laying her hand on your belly and then your mother was very supportive of breastfeeding. This really helps to anchor your character in this long tradition of bringing life into the world as a woman and makes your experience so deep and rich and full. I just love those counterpoints to the yelling at your husband to go slam his dick in the door. So…

CATHLEEN O’MALLEY: Yeah, thank you. Yeah. And to be clear, Matt, my husband, his name was not changed to protect the innocent. He really plays a supporting character and comes out very well in this show, let it be known.

LISA REAGAN: Oh yeah. Absolutely.

CATHLEEN O’MALLEY: It is amazing how all of the things that my mother warned me would become clear to me when I was an apathetic teenager. I was never quite an apathetic teenager. I definitely had a lot of angst as a kid and there were certain choices she made as a parent and certain things she prioritized that she promised me would all make sense when I had my own children and then when that finally happened, it couldn’t be more true and I do think that when we say an anchor of the show, I really respond to that. It is and we were talking about this a little bit earlier, there is nothing that we share more than the fact of having been born.

There is some woman who gave birth to all of us in some way and that there is no birth story that is like any other birth story. What a missing element in our society that we do not ask and we do not know each others birth stories. My birth story to my mother is something that I have with her and I share with her that nobody else has and that our own experiences of birth of our own children or the effect that our birth had on our family.

These stories are part of who we are and they are part of our family’s legacy. There is just not nearly enough conversation about that. So hopefully, if one of the outcomes of the show could be that people become curious in their own birth stories and that if they have the ability to reach back and find out information about that, or reach back to their own parents, their own loved ones, or if that opportunity is no longer available to them, sort of get more interested in each others birth stories. I just feel like that would be a wonderful outcome of this show and I think also a way to really elevate that thing that women do, which is give birth.

Witnessing The Birth Of A Mother: The Transformation

LISA REAGAN: Well, the transformation of your character in the play is really, I’m not just saying this, it is profound, because you do address this core piece of conscious parenting which is about the bio-cultural conflict and that phrase was pioneered by Joseph Chilton Pierce and he says parents don’t realize that their biological beings and they have biological imperatives and then we have cultural imperatives that are not based on these biological imperatives, at least today.

Text KINDRED to 22828 to subscribe to our newsletter or click on the image to subscribe with email

So new parents are saddled with what’s called the bio-cultural conflict and you address that repeatedly in this beautiful way without naming it throughout the entire play. But one of the places that I found it very encapsulated was the igloo chant and you’re trying to tell yourself that you can get through this birth because somewhere in the world there’s a women giving birth in an igloo. It’s almost this thing that we hold up to ourselves and we all do it to say exactly what you were saying before, everybody has given birth, I can do this too, but a part of me realizes that today when we expect ourselves to go into a medical model system, and again this is not making this into a black and white issue because it certainly is not, but the fact is in America, maternal medical health is so deadly.

We are more likely to die in childbirth, seven times more likely, than our counterparts in Ireland and Italy, and mothers of color in the United States are more likely to die in childbirth, 3-5 times more likely, than their white counterparts, American white counterparts. So this igloo moment when you’re surrounded by some of them are strangers, you’re talking about these hands that are coming at you and what’s happening in the room that’s pulling your attention away from your body, this is a very unnatural state I think to give birth in and then you’re kind of rescuing yourself with this thought of connecting with the primal in yourself, but it almost feels like it could be a punishment or a whip to keep going, keep going, because somebody else can do it. They can do it and they’re in an igloo. That’s very complicated and very deep that you’re going there and that you’re able to remember that about that moment in your birth.

CATHLEEN O’MALLEY: Yeah, to give a little bit more additional context to this moment, so my husband and I in the weeks leading up to my labor and delivery, we had watched a series that was produced by the BBC called “Human Planet” and it’s a survey of the most remote inhabited places on earth. So we are learning about communities that live in tree houses, we’re learning about the most brutal subzero temperatures and communities that lived and survived and thrived in the arctic, in Greenland, isolated islands. I was struck sitting there, 8-9 months pregnant on my couch in Cleveland, Ohio, and just inspired and struck by what I knew to be true, which is that lots of babies are being born in these situations and sort of all of my anxieties about being able to weather the pain and to fulfill my dream of having unmedicated childbirth, I was very attached to certain outcomes. This was all kind of unfolding inside of me as I was watching these documentaries and so it became… so there’s a line in the show where I tell my husband, I say, “Matt, remind me when the time comes that there are pregnant women giving birth right now in igloos.” There’s a moment in the show where I sort of peak labor, I can barely speak, and I utter those two words, “Igloo. Igloo,” and he pours blue Gatorade into my mouth.

That is a moment that really happened and it is a moment in the show. What you bring up here is so interesting. The more that we become a truly global world and that our orientation becomes more global and that things like media and shows, television shows, like I’m referencing, and increased travel, the more that we are learning and sort of turning back to, including the developing world, turning back to older practices or unadulterated practices related to health in particular childbirth. There’s a bit of picking and choosing that’s happening and this is at least my experience where I came into my hospital birth wanting it to be as natural as possible, but there are so many things both going into the labor and delivery and coming out of the labor and delivery that where there’s not a structure in place socially, culturally, or even logistically to support a “natural birth” and postpartum experience.

LISA REAGAN: Right. Right.

CATHLEEN O’MALLEY: I think one of the things that I have been confronting. I am about 14 months outside of giving birth, my daughter just turned a year, is this binary particularly related to work. There’s the stay at home approach, and then there’s the go back to work approach and I’ve been more of the “stay at home”, although if I were to truly stay at home, I would have gone completely bonkers. So what my not a full time working mom experience has been packing my baby into the car and driving back and forth and seeking, desperately seeking community, because despite the fact that I live in a city, to find other mothers to be around other mothers, has really been a huge effort.

No number of playgroups, no number of good friends dropping by and visiting or preschools. No amount of that replaces the absence of 24 hour community, which we as human beings, we just don’t in this sort of metropolitan existence that is living in American cities, we just don’t necessarily have that. To have the kind of support that I feel like as a species, as mammals, we are sort of evolved to live in, it really takes stepping out of sort of contemporary culture to find that. Their intention was communities, big group homes, these things exist, but they are very very very marginal, at least in the US. So that has been, you know, this notion of bio-cultural conflict, I feel like is so much at the heart of the show, because there are best practices that are pulled from nature and pulled from science, particularly related to, something related to sleep, somethings related to breastfeeding, skin to skin, all of these wonderful best practices that are making their way into modern medicine, but culturally and from a legislative perspective and logistical perspective, we have just do not have the structures in place to really support women doing that to the degree that is necessary.

So I do really respond to and really appreciate having a word to describe that conflict, which I think is the source of a lot of craziness for lack of a better word that new parents are feeling and that mothers feel. There’s a hormonal process, we’re filled with hormones and drive and instinct, but when we look around in the world, too often we’re sort of isolated in that. Looking for answers and not really finding them.

LISA REAGAN: Well, my loneliness as a new mother drove me to the last 20 years of doing this nonprofit work and in the beginning it was all this desperate crazy insane throwing myself finding community and creating community. I have written an essay on Kindred called My Grandma Is Not A Hippie and everything my grandmother held dear wasn’t because she was a hippie. She was a North Carolina farmer’s wife, but she had those things and I saw it and I thought I was going to have those things and it was so programmed in my DNA when I had a baby to have those things, it was really like a daily sitting in the car screaming like why do I have these things? How do I that? Where do I create community? Where are they? Sitting in the car, driving 30 minutes to a public park to meet with other mothers.

CATHLEEN O’MALLEY: Yeah.

Rediscovering Primal Instinct And Labeling It “New”

LISA REAGAN: Yeah, I did that. I think it is also interesting that you’re pointing out, how do these biological imperatives finally make their way into our language, because you point out in the play that the lean back method that you learn when you go to a breastfeeding support group. You’re looking at it and you say, this is the latest in breastfeeding technology, but like so many things, recaptured, repackaged, it’s instinct. It’s known by another name, anthropological breastfeeding. Leaning back, this recall, this is how I was, this is how we milked in the minutes after she was born. I’ve seen that repeatedly that if our culture can find a way to pretend like they discovered something and try it out under different language and have a nice little marketing campaign around it, then maybe it will be acceptable. I think it’s a great thing, lean back method is awesome.

14 Changes To Support Breastfeeding We Need To Make Now

CATHLEEN O’MALLEY: Yeah.

LISA REAGAN: It’s just the rediscovery of something ancient.

CATHLEEN O’MALLEY: Absolutely. Yeah, you really nailed it. It’s slap a label on it, develop a nice logo and then it becomes kangaroo care or the lean back method, or even things, I haven’t been able to extricate myself from a number of e-newsletters and parenting groups and things that while I was sort of registered for when I bought my first pair of maternity jeans, I got on all of these LISTSERVs and haven’t been able to quite unsubscribe, but it seems like it can become sort of addictive, these top ten lists, or these ten things you can do to make sure your child is successful or smarter than all of the other babies, or you know. Things like make sure baby gets lots of social time. These things that are glib, but when you look at the way our neighborhoods are structured and look at the way that maternity leave exists or not, it’s not enough to identify things as healthy good practices when women are sort of sent out of the hospital, if they’re lucky, 3 days after birth with a pamphlet and see you in 6 weeks for 15 minutes.

LISA REAGAN: Right. And most have to go back to work I think it’s 2 weeks in the United States, whereas most countries… we are at the bottom for paid parental leave, we’re at the bottom again of all developed countries. So the breastfeeding question is almost doomed from the beginning. There is little or no workplace support. Legislature is being rolled out in different states now. I know here in Virginia they tried to get that legislated this past year and that didn’t sail. So just being aware of what we’re up against so we can be kind to ourselves and each other, I think that’s really the core of understanding what that bio-cultural conflict is that we’re facing so that we can roll out our compassion instead of our judgment and glib advice.

CATHLEEN O’MALLEY: I think we were sort of touching on this earlier, but for your listener’s sakes, I did continue to breastfeed my daughter and so that ended up being a goal of mine personally and it turns out that we were able to make that work after a lot of false starts and missteps at the beginning. So that’s something that I am very glad we were able to do.

But I also have done a lot of pumping and have many friends who went back to work full time who pumped for upwards of a year and I got interested in some of the research around pumping and something that has been coming up when we talk about sort of glib statements that are completely unsupported in reality from a logistical perspective, the whole “breast is best” campaign is very touchy and it sounds very good in theory, but I know that I went into breastfeeding having a mother who breastfed, but who lives about 600 miles away. I was completely unprepared for the pain, for all of the different… for the anxiety around whether or not my daughter was getting enough food and what I should be looking for. Again, I have a college degree and I read everything I was sent home with. I am coming at this from a place of extreme privilege and yet, even with those resources, there was still just a tremendous amount of challenges that we came up against. But related to pumping, some of the research is now showing, wait wait wait, it’s not enough. The milk is not enough. The touch is part of what makes breastfeeding result in all of these wonderful outcomes.

So the sort of counter movement, which is the “fed with love” movement, which is whether it is breast milk, whether it is your milk, whether it is donated milk, whether it is pumped, whether it is formula, whatever it is, feeding with an eye gaze, feeding with touch, feeding with connection, feeding with time and care and a mother with a peaceful heart. That is actually what is the source of all of the wonderful bonding that can take place during the feeding of the baby. That was something that didn’t make it into the play, but this idea that you know, the wonderful invention that was the breast pump, which liberated women from being sort of pinned to a couch in the early months of their child’s life and it allowed me to go to rehearsals and the fact that I have a pump has allowed me to do some things professionally, that it’s not… we can’t let the technology of the pump, you know, blind us to the fact that the milk isn’t all that there is to breastfeeding and sort of how typical it is of us culturally to extract the milk, pat the woman on the back and send her back into the mill, versus actually just develop comprehensive maternity policies.

I would rather pay for a breast pump versus get the free one. The hospital sends us, at least in Cleveland, a lot of insurance companies send you home with a free breast pump. I would have rather just had substantial maternity leave along the lines of what other developed nations and even nations that are considered developing nations. Pretty much every nation except for the United States, Papua New Guinea and I believe a region of South Africa, those are the three places that don’t have paid maternity leave and it’s just, let’s not worry so much about the breast pumps, let’s work on getting maternity leave so women can have more choice. So that’s something maybe in the next iteration of the show there’s a scene that needs to be added in.

LISA REAGAN: So to throw out there, March for Moms is happening May 6 and it’s 2018 now and we’re recording April 24, so that’s coming up in about two weeks and that is a central focus of March for Moms in Washington and there are going to marches all over the country that Saturday as well. So that is a very hot topic right now. It does need more funding and more activists.

CATHLEEN O’MALLEY: Yeah.

Motherhood In America: MilkDrunk As A Modern Wisdom Teaching

LISA REAGAN: So I wanted to kind of wrap up with where this character ends up in her transformation because it’s very very precious. I will say this about the bonding, there are some very beautiful bonding moments with the baby, your baby in the play, as well as just very heart touching. You are talking about her giggling for the first time when you’re dancing with her in the breastfeeding class. That was very sweet. But there’s this what I think I feel is a compassion towards yourself by the time you’re through the other side in some ways, you talk about going out for the first time, and you say, I forgot what to do with my arms and then you run into someone you haven’t seen in a while and I just want to read this piece here because your friend is saying, what are you doing? And you say:

“I did a hundred thousand things today, but none of them add up to anything recognizable by my former life. A day measured by ounces, literally, by drops. I let the question sit there for a moment. My edges rubbed raw, my insides still stitches burning with the story untold, the days that are long, the weeks flying by, on a river of liquids and solids and smells. Moves from body, my body doctored by cream and coconut oil and ice packs in my underwear and nipples under plastic shields. I am sturdier now, swollen, quieter, but strong. I make milk.”

It’s just beautiful, but how do you say this to your friend?

CATHLEEN O’MALLEY: Thank you.

Cannabis, Pregnancy And Breastfeeding with Laurel Wilson: A Kindred New Story Video

LISA REAGAN: You say you know well it’s really good. I feed baby. We are mama baby jungle cats. This is quite a transformation this character goes through because at the beginning, she is going into the hospital room with her New Yorker magazine that she’s going to read and her cooler to put her placenta in and the preparation part at the beginning, I love it. It is wonderful. It just captures everybody’s mentality when you don’t know. You can’t know. There’s no way to know this unless you’ve been there, but in the end, this is who she is. Tell us about this person.

CATHLEEN O’MALLEY: Yeah, right. The opening sequence which essentially is an attempt to really capture the thinking that my husband and I had going into checking into the hospital. Which was we had planned a wedding together at some point many years earlier and this was my chance. I was being induced. There was this element of surprise that we were sort of taking out of it. There was a level of like, for lack of a better word, like an art direction to the piece. We brought music. We brought snacks and fuzzy slippers and reading materials and games. Looking back, it was completely absurd. It was as if, and this is the line in the show, it was as if we were checking into a B&B.

I recognize that not all births, when you don’t know that you’re about to give birth, there’s no room for that. But at least in our case, we had really packed and looking back, what is that? It’s the mind of somebody for whom the birth was about me. I knew I would be meeting a baby that I would love more than any person on earth, but at the time, there was no way to mentally prepare for the love and so much more. There are not nouns or adjectives to describe that feeling. By the end of the show, and actually very soon after baby’s head starts cresting and I’m looking at this huge Victorian sized rolling mirror at the end of birth unit, there’s a “getting it” that occurs. There’s this other person who is on her own path. There is this other journey and I am part of facilitating her journey into the world and that I am a vessel for that. That has changed my life and by the end of the show, spoiler alert, we’re back in the birth room at the very end of the show.

There’s a flashback. There’s a description of the first nursing and how all of the things that through science we now know to be true, that the heartbeats become joined, that her temperature stabilizes, that the act of nursing and the act of labor, the hormonal experience of that triggers the process that ends up helping kick off the breastfeeding, so all of that is sort of happening and by the end of the show we see this vision of this person who has now become a dyad. There’s a line too where I turn to my husband and I see him and you know, we’re at the end of a journey. The journey of labor and delivery, but there is just no way at the end we thought we had arrived at the end. When the baby came out, the end of a long exhausting journey and then to be now the parent of a one-year-old, oh we have made it through the first year. Just wait til the second year. Just wait til eighteen years. Just wait til you’re giving them away at their own wedding. Just wait.

So the fact that there is no way to really grasp what it feels like, what any of this feels like unless you’ve lived it and yet the way that it is something that is so intensely personal and unique and individual, but yet there is a resonance, because we all have felt that thing that cannot be named for those of us that have lived that experience. Then those, it’s often an invitation for people to peak into that experience who maybe never want that for themselves or even have never given it much thought. The hope is that the play is also an invitation and a window and a door into that experience as well.

LISA REAGAN: And it is and thank you so so much for writing it. Tell me before we go, tell everybody where they can find you online and what are the plans for the play for now.

CATHLEEN O’MALLEY: Great. So, I am in talks with there’s a wonderful network of women and female identifying artists out on Facebook, the Women Plus in Theater Group, and I have been reaching out to this group of artists to look for venues to tour the show. There are fringe festivals nationwide. There are some regional opportunities that I am in the very very early stages of pursuing right now. So the show is very lean and mean. It is very portable. Me and a chair and a director. So I am looking for what those theatrical venues might be that would support a show that explores these topics, but I am also looking at touring opportunities inside of the natural birth community and inside of the women’s health communities, so things like there’s a national convening of doulas, there’s a midwifery conference that actually have multiple midwifery conferences that happen every year on a national scale. So I am also looking for health workers and birth workers and groups related to healthy children and healthy families that would be interested in including the show as part of their programming.

So I have a personal website. My name is Cathleen O’Malley http://cathleenomalley.com and there is information about my background and also information about the show. I am always interested in discussing, you know, how this show could be a part of meeting the goals of organizations and of activists, and again health workers, people that are interested in moving the dial on how we talk about birth and how we talk about the truth of women lived experiences related to birth and the postpartum stage. I am very interested to see where the show is going to go next. It’s wide open at this point.

LISA REAGAN: That’s fantastic. I look forward to seeing where it goes as well. I think it is one of the most fantastic and riveting vehicles for change that I have seen in a while. I think it is exactly what we need right now. It’s very invigorating and inspirational and you know, for worn out old activists like myself to read something like this, it is so refreshing and it just makes me get a second wind, so thank you so much for that.

CATHLEEN O’MALLEY: Well, thank you for reaching out and thank you for this platform. This is exactly what we need, a place to come together and be sharing thoughts and be hearing people speak on these topics. So thank you Lisa for the work you’re doing.

LISA REAGAN: Thank you. I’ll tell you if you’re a listener and you have found this recording somewhere, you can find the transcript and other resources to go along with it at http://kindredmedia.org and we are part of an award winning non-profit who has been around for 20 years, so please also make your donations while you’re there to help support us bringing together and sponsoring the new story and getting the word out there. There’s a lot of really good stuff happening if you know where to go, i.e. Kindred. Thank you so much, Cathleen.

CATHLEEN O’MALLEY: Thank you, Lisa.

RESOURCES

Watch the entire Kindred New Story series, The Healing Power of Breastfeeding:

]]>http://kindredmedia.org/2018/04/21311/feed/5Consciousness And Climate Change: An Interview With Stephanie Mines, PhDhttp://kindredmedia.org/2018/04/consciousness-and-climate-change-an-interview-with-stephanie-mines-phd/
http://kindredmedia.org/2018/04/consciousness-and-climate-change-an-interview-with-stephanie-mines-phd/#respondFri, 06 Apr 2018 00:16:28 +0000http://kindredmedia.org/?p=21246How will climate change impact our human consciousness? How are consciousness-raising movements like #MeToo bringing to light enculturated trauma that will move us toward individual and collective healing? How can a Sustainable Healthcare Model help us prepare and heal for climate change? Listen to neuroscientist, Stephanie Mines, PhD, share insights into the relationship between trauma, […]

How will climate change impact our human consciousness? How are consciousness-raising movements like #MeToo bringing to light enculturated trauma that will move us toward individual and collective healing? How can a Sustainable Healthcare Model help us prepare and heal for climate change?

Please support our 20 year old, award-winning, nonprofit work to Share the New Story of Childhood, Parenthood and the Human Family.

Listen to neuroscientist, Stephanie Mines, PhD, share insights into the relationship between trauma, human consciousness, the wake up call of the #MeToo movement and climate change. Mines shares over 35 years of insights into human neurobiology and spirituality crossing worldviews and integrating our capacity for healing from shock and trauma. Mines believes the shock of climate change will move the now considered fringe science of healing ourselves to the center of our culture and consciousness in the coming years. Her insights, along with internationally renown speakers, will be featured at the upcoming Consciousness and Climate Change: Our Legacy to the Earth conference at Findhorn, Scotland in April 2019.

The transcript for this interview is below.

Discover more about the Consciousness and Climate Change conference: ccc19.org

ABOUT THE CONFERENCE

Climate Change & Consciousness: Our Legacy for the Earth, April 20-26 2019, will be a collaborative and participatory investigation into how we can steward a sustainable future on what has already become a radically changed planet Earth. We have travelled to this “new” planet on a burst of carbon dioxide. A new planet requires new ways of living.

The conference will bring together eminent scientists, wisdom keepers, business people, activists, artists, entrepreneurs, young people and others, to envision and begin to inhabit our joint future. It will be an international, inter-generational and multi-disciplinary gathering. This is the principle of ‘the big tent‘, borrowed from party politics, whereby diverse viewpoints, backgrounds and interests (the ‘voices in the room’) are brought together to engage and dialogue.

Through interactive, embodied and experiential means, participants will access intuitive, intelligent and innovative insights into how we will meet the demands of this new world. Each individual will be invited to invoke their ‘Legacy for the Earth.’ Our combined roles and commitment will represent a global mission of stewardship. Everyone will be part of this love story.

Participants will co-collaborate to explore:

The science and truth of climate change in language that we can all comprehend;

Ways to embody our longing to connect with the Earth and hear Her voice;

How we can build and rebuild communities as functional entities;

Political, legal and social activism, and networking for social change;

How do we nurture children and support youth to restore our environment;

Racism, misogyny and gender bias – how they deepen the environmental crisis;

Contemporary and traditional resources to address the trauma of climate change;

What can we learn from indigenous cultures, activists and wisdom keepers;

Healthcare and the detoxification of environmental pollutants and toxins; and

How to generate inspiration for a grassroots upsurge to reclaim our future.

THREE MAJOR ORIENTATIONS

Three major threads running though the conference will be:

AWAKE: Facing the truths of climate change.

CELEBRATE: Using the arts to express our love for the Earth and all life.

ACT: Developing our response, locally and globally.

WHY THIS CONFERENCE IS UNIQUE

While words like ‘climate change’ and ‘sustainability’ are in the popular parlance, the truth about the magnitude of our environmental predicament is not well understood. This is in part because the language used to deliver the science is frequently infused with acronyms that deter engagement. This conference will translate scientific jargon into language that is accessible to anyone. In addition, we intend a celebratory response to climate change that emphasises human resilience and creativity, which is key to coping with the scientific reality. These two sides of the coin (environmental science and celebratory resilience) will be linked at every juncture of this gathering.

This conference will be led by some of the most knowledgeable and highly regarded voices of the climate change movement. The key contributors are recognised internationally for their expertise, their commanding presence, and their proven capacity to identify practical and optimistic strategies for sustainability action. Joining these voices with those of artists, healers, parents and youth has seldom been attempted in quite such a way.

Consciousness and Climate Change: An Interview with Stephanie Mines, PhD

LISA REAGAN: It is wonderful to be here with you. We’re here to talk about today is climate change and consciousness, which is also an upcoming conference in Findhorn, Scotland a year from now. But there is so much territory to cover between consciousness and trauma and climate change, you and I could meet regularly for the next year.

STEPHANIE MINES: I’d love to do that. I’d love to do that Lisa!

LISA REAGAN: Your work in the past has been on trauma. You have the book, We Are All in Shock. I remember getting that book years ago and this was… what year was that book published.

STEPHANIE MINES: That book was published in 2013.

LISA REAGAN: Okay, it wasn’t that long ago. It feels like it was. But, your work has focused on trauma for 35 years. Can you start us off by just helping us get some understanding around what is shock, what is trauma, what are the differences?

The Difference Between Shock and Trauma

STEPHANIE MINES: Yeah, I’m happy to do that and let me just say that there was the earlier book which was Sexual Abuse – Sacred Wound: Transforming Deep Trauma. That was published in 1998, so that was really my first book on this topic of differentiating shock from trauma and We Are All in Shock actually was the most comprehensive statement about that. So that first book on sexual abuse was the definition really of shock. So sexual abuse, a violation of that magnitude is in the category of shock more than it is in the category of trauma.

See Kindred’s Contributing Editor, Robin Grille at the Climate Change and Consciousness: Our Legacy for the Earth!

So these words are used interchangeably and it’s unlikely that I’m going to make a big difference in that habit of using those words interchangeably. But for people like us who really can make those discernment, it is important from the standpoint of being of service of others to realize that there is a difference. So it is a difference of magnitude and the illustration that I frequently reference is a metaphor: if the lights in the room where you’re doing your work go out, that’s a trauma, because you can’t proceed with your work, but usually if the lights go out in the room where you are, they can be turned back on fairly easily. There is a solution available. There are resources available to get the lights back on.

But the lights go out in your house, in your neighborhood, in your village, in your community and nobody knows why that happened and there isn’t a direct way to get the lighting restored, that is shocking. That is overwhelming. People become disoriented and confused and they feel helpless and they feel that they cannot access the resources that we get them out of the hole that they’re in and that is much more the experience of shock. So, the ratio that we look at to differentiate shock from trauma is: are the resources available to remedy the situation? With shock, the resources are frequently not obvious and may fall into black and white categories like life and death. So the way that shock usually happens is when the individual is in an unresourced situation.

Developmentally, shock frequently relates to early development. So, in utero, for instance, the resources are somewhat limited. So shock that occurs in utero is overwhelming. The prenate, the developing baby, cannot relocate, can’t find another food source, can’t find other options for how they will survive. So the availability of options is a critical factor in differentiating shock from trauma.

LISA REAGAN: It’s really about the resources. Are there differences in neurobiology and neuropsychology?

STEPHANIE MINES: Oh, absolutely. You mean, in terms of what happens as a result of shock and trauma?

LISA REAGAN: Right, I guess I’m thinking about the ACES study that is very popular right now and also the term trauma-informed treatment and trauma-informed care are popping up and no one is using the word shock, so I am just trying to help our listeners understand what they’re hearing out there and the difference between what they’re hearing out there, as you’re saying, resources to address it and resources not available, and what is it. We’re going to talk about ACES in just a moment.

STEPHANIE MINES: Yeah, I am really glad that you’re correlating the fact that trauma is being used much more globally. The word shock is not used. I do want to mention that Naomi Klein, a climate change commentator, wrote a book called The Shock Doctrine and I think that’s important. We’ll come back to that in our conversation because climate change falls into the category of shock versus trauma. I even use the term trauma-informed touch to explain some of the interventions that I teach in the entire approach of shock and trauma. I think that term is useful because it implies that the person touching or the person providing treatment has an understanding of trauma in a kind of general way.

From my standpoint as a neuroscientist, differentiating shock from trauma is essential because the way that the brain responds to trauma and the way that the brain responds to shock is different.

LISA REAGAN: That’s exactly what I suspected.

STEPHANIE MINES: Yeah, exactly. This actually correlates with addictive patterns. So, if the individual’s organic quest to satisfy a need is impossible to satiate, there are no resources to satiate it, those are completely unavailable, the individual is more likely to find an addictive compensation because their life depends on satisfying that need. Addictions are simply compensations for organic needs that were impossible to satisfy. In terms of ACES, what we see that this study educates us about is that when early development is thwarted, when early development is inappropriate and not able to meet the needs of the developing being, then not only is that person psychologically in distress, that person is in distress at every level of their being, including their immune system. Their very longevity is threatened and that makes perfect sense to me.

This has a great deal to do with how the immune system functions and the relationship between the immune system and the nervous system. The nervous system, which organizes in response to threat, has a direct line of communication to the kidney-adrenal system and if that system of adrenal or cortisol response is oriented in a particular way, either sympathetically or para-sympathetically, over and over and over again, there is no way that the immune system can’t be compromised and the degree of compromise of the immune system is in direct correlation to the magnitude of threat of shock and trauma in early life.

The ACES study is very useful from that standpoint. The one thing that I do want to point out about the ACES Study and it’s incredible value, especially for the medical profession, is that there are other options for the individual who has such a burden on their nervous and immune systems, and I am speaking more here from my own personal experience as someone who came into this field as a result of my own early experiences of trauma and I don’t think that is unique to me. I think a lot of people in the helping professions entered that field because of their own experience and their compassionate outreach. I would say that while adverse impacts on my early life were definitely overwhelming and definitely fell into the category of shock, I did find resources in certain areas within myself that I would define as spiritually-based that allowed me to develop considerably in my health in my life and to be in a field that increases the quality of my lifestyle and increases my health, so that as I enter my elder-hood, which I believe now I’m well established in, I’m about to be 74, I find myself getting healthier and healthier.

I think that is because I have learned the art of regeneration, which is what I teach in the TARA Approach, even though the outcomes for adverse childhood experiences are daunting, there are other options. There are ways to regenerate. There are ways for those who choose consciousness and for those who research appropriate resources to not be condemned by any means to those health consequences of adverse childhood experiences. I just want to hold that out there: that people who experience adverse childhood experiences are not condemned to poor health. With the right education, the right outreach, and what I call sustainable health, which is really more on a family level, on a grassroots level, on a community level, on a level that everyone can access, through bringing in those sustainable health resources that I am very much in the business of compiling,we can turn this around. I intend to make that available to as many people as possible.

LISA REAGAN: I do appreciate the work that you’re doing and I should tell the listeners that Dr. Mines is one of those rare scientists and practitioners that not only bridge worldviews, but goes back and forth up and down timelines and integrates our neurobiology with our spirituality in ways that are practical and it’s stunning. She has a great TED talk on Kindred, The Neuropsychology of Spiritual Guidance, that you’re welcome to enjoy.

Right now, I want to do what I do best, which is an old gum shoe journalist, be a Debbie Downer for a moment, laughs. What I want to do is talk about the distance that we’ve already traveled with the ACES study, done in 1973 by the Kaiser Permanente Group by Dr. Vincent Felitti (watch his talk here). His talk is also up on Kindred along with some other information on ACES and an ACES quiz to find out what your score is. This adverse childhood events list came out of studying women who couldn’t lose weight and what he found was that the majority of them were sexually molested at some point in their childhood and losing weight made their neurobiology feel unsafe, so they would just pack the weight. That revelations prompted a deeper look, because as he says in his interviews, nobody believes that relationship was possible: that you could have lifelong consequences from childhood trauma. That’s why the ACES study is so riveting. Even though it is 2018, people are rolling it out like they just discovered it.

For example, Oprah Winfrey was just on 60 Minutes last month saying that the ACES study was “game-changing”. So, I would just like to say I know this is why Kindred exists and why we do the work we do here as a we keep trying to trot out the New Story and gather everyone who is a part of it so that there is more visibility and coherence in this new emerging worldview. But when you are saying that it is possible to recover and they are acting like they just discovered it…

STEPHANIE MINES: Yeah.

Oprah Winfrey, Trauma Recovery And Waiting On Mainstream Media To Catch Up

LISA REAGAN: How much longer do we have to wait for this information to mainstream as well?

STEPHANIE MINES: Yeah, well, this is beautiful what you’re pointing to, Lisa. I really appreciate the way that you’re bringing all of this together. I am reminded very much of the work of Rebecca Solnit, who talks about what’s in the center and what’s on the edges in her small book that she wrote that is still incredibly relevant on hope, Hope In The Dark. What you’re saying really illustrates this. So in the center, we have Oprah Winfrey talking to one of my heroes, Dr. Bruce Perry. Love that man and I have followed his work and his writing devotedly. He really is a hero for me. But here she is talking about information and that some of us, like me, have been talking about for decades and acting as if, wow, this is a game-changer, and because she is talking about it, it becomes a game-changer because she’s in the center. I mean, Bruce Perry has been doing this work for a long time. I am so glad she chose him because he really packs in the experience and his compassion for working with children and families is enormous and he has been brought in to all of the major cases where children have been abused and taken advantage of and misused in collective situations.

But, meanwhile, while we have this sudden event in the center with Oprah Winfrey, out on the fringes on the corners on the edges of society in the places that we don’t see in the media, we don’t see on major television networks, not being pushed as headlines, we have people like you and me and many many mothers and families who I have worked with for a long time who are soaking up this understanding of relational based family dynamics where parents are the anchors for their children and understand how they can emphatically nurture the development of their offspring and who are really fostering development that is organic, that is following the child. That is allowing the child’s brain to have optimum opportunities for evolution.

This is happening outside of the cameras and the racy news stuff that we all think is so important and Rebecca Solnit’s theory, which I espouse, is that those edges and those outskirts are slowly moving into the center. We will slowly become the centerpiece in a very natural and simple way. Unfortunately, I think it’s climate change that’s going to cause that to occur because climate change will eradicate this idea that what is in the center, what everybody appears to be, you know, racing their hearts about, that will disappear. What happens in collective communities where people are really surviving and thriving based on their love for one another, based on their respect for each other, based on their belief in the children of the future and fostering human development and serving humanity — that will then become the centerpiece and those things that we’ve known, those of us particularly have been working in promoting mother and child-centered birth practices and understanding the crucial role of the primal period in development. Those of us who have been doing that now for a long time, we’ve been talking this talk for quite a while and people have been listening and raising their children according to that. Those people will then be able to flourish in a world that will be radically altered by climate change as Naomi Klein describes in The Shock Doctrine.

Climate Change Will Shift Our Consciousness

LISA REAGAN: So climate change might shift our consciousness in a way that we won’t need to have those in the center, the status quo defenders, people who have pharmaceutical ads as being the answer between their show breaks be the people who are going to show us the way. That is my concern with the ACES study now is who is trotting it out and who is going to benefit from the “discovery” of the ACES study. I say that because what I want to do now is move us into the territory of what you have discovered and what you write about and what you’re presenting at the Consciousness and Climate Change Conference, which requires us to shift our worldview considerably in order to facilitate these healing models.

Robin Grille’s video to help parents talk with children about climate change is brilliant and practical. You can also find Robin at the upcoming Climate Change and Consciousness Conference at Findhorn, Scotland, in April 2019.

STEPHANIE MINES: Absolutely and it’s really interesting to me. I myself am completely strapped by the fact that I just recently did my first webinar that is precursor to the climate change and consciousness event that is going to happen in 2019 at Findhorn so that is a monumental event with top name presenters like Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein and Vandana Shiva and many other stellar minds speaking about climate change and consciousness, but climate change and consciousness is actually a movement and from my standpoint, the movement has already begun and I launched this first webinar just about a week ago on the topic of women, cancer, the #MeToo movement and climate change.

This is the interface between what ACES is saying about adverse early childhood experiences, the current sorry state of our health in the world, which is declining rapidly and cancer being despite some advances in certain areas, on the rise, particularly for women, particularly for women of color and the way in which we need to look both deeper and more simply at how we can vitalize our immune system functions in the face of climate change and in the face of adverse childhood experiences. This is completely counter to the pharmaceutical approach and I have to say, I am required to, but I also absolutely do believe this, that I am not speaking against the allopathic or Western medical model. That model has incredible value. When my husband had a heart attack, I can tell you that I was very happy that the kind of services that he received in hospital worked. They worked beautifully and he has had an amazing recovery and he is probably healthier than ever before as a result of having a stent, of taking certain kinds of medications, and also living an extremely healthy lifestyle.

So I am not speaking against the medical profession. I respect and appreciate the medical profession for what they’ve done for me and my family, but as I think we all know, they don’t have the whole story and they act as if they do. So I believe that the two can work together, this really deep and simple understanding of our empowered capacities to heal ourselves and to heal our families and to heal our families. I believe that the capacity to do that is in our own hands, not in opposition to the medical profession, with the medical profession when the medical profession is needed, which isn’t all of the time.

So in my webinar on women, cancer, the #MeToo movement and climate change, what I talked about was the historical legacy of women keeping secrets and that’s of course the correlation with the #MeToo movement. So the #MeToo movement is an incredibly healthy movement. It’s a movement to come out of hiding. It’s a movement to have the courage to tell the truth. It’s the movement of independence and it’s the movement of an authentic voice and lineages of women have compromised their volume because of traditions that they sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously and habitually replicate. That has got to change and that is changing and in my webinar, I was encouraging the participants to change it for themselves deeply and precisely.

So what I was pointing to was how incredibly precise the immune system is. The immune system is gorgeous. It is such a work of art and what the immune system does is make definitive decisions instantaneously, so the immune system has the capacity to identify a threat and just eradicate it on the spot so that it is decimated. That capacity to have impeccable boundaries like that and to act on those impeccable boundaries, we need to cultivate. There is too much deliberation whether something is threatening or is not threatening. So the immune system gets confused when the person in whose body it lives doesn’t take care of themselves in that definitive way and that’s what telling the truth is a simple and definitive action that calls the shots the way they are and trusts in the power of that truthfulness and that’s the correlation between the #MeToo movement, women, and cancer and I say that with no blame whatsoever to the women who have perhaps felt they had to keep secrets, but that time is over. That is completely unnecessary and coming out of hiding is much more valuable than staying hidden.

That action gives the immune system a sense of being in the right place at the right time and doing the right thing and the way that climate change enters that formula is that climate change is a shock because it threatens everything and how do you respond to it? It has to be definitive and it has been immediate. So we have to change a lot and it’s that willingness to change. It’s that receptivity to change. It’s that resilience that promises to give us health and that’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot as I approach my 74th birthday and I realize, you know, my whole life is turning on a dime right now. I am remaking myself as I enter my 74th year. There’s nothing about retirement or stability or you know, comfort, that is appealing to me. I am stepping into a whole new evolution, a whole new phase of who I am and how I appear in the world and how I feel and that to me is the health that I have earned through the regeneration from adverse experiences.

Gaia Is Calling Women To Wake Up To Self-Nurture

LISA REAGAN: I have read your blog post about women and climate change. Can you speak specifically the way you do in your articles about how climate change is going to affect women in particular?

Text to SUBSCRIBE or click on the image to subscribe with email

STEPHANIE MINES: Well, women I think are the leaders in this period of accelerating climate change. I just watched an incredible video by a leader, a man, who spoke of the womb of the earth and how nothing really changes until the women change. We, I feel, are being called to step up as leaders, as our Mother Earth, the deeply feminine force of the earth, Gaia, calls us forward to stand for her. We are her voices. I think this is a time of challenge for women and the way that our health is being impacted, I think is a reflection of how deeply we are challenged. I have many young students, women I know, friends of my daughters, who are being diagnosed with breast cancer and it’s horrific, but what is amazing is how they’re choosing with these diagnoses to turn it around. So they’re taking the diagnosis as a wake up call and they are empowering themselves and finding out who they really are because of this diagnosis very much as climate change is helping everyone, but women in particular to find out who we are.

LISA REAGAN: So let me draw some… let me connect some dots between you use the phrase “kinesthetic empathy”…

STEPHANIE MINES: Yeah.

LISA REAGAN: To describe how women are enculturated to be the sponges for trauma around them, especially in men, you’ve written a whole book about bringing war home to the family and how that is not even addressed in our culture. So how does someone turn around this being a sponge for everyone into now I am going to take care of myself.

STEPHANIE MINES: Yeah. This is the wake up call and it’s a great question. You are still an incredible journalist, Lisa, and I don’t think you should refer to yourself as an old journalist.

LISA REAGAN: I’m an old shoe. I’ve been around a while.

STEPHANIE MINES: Well, you know, it’s the critical mind of the journalist that I love and that I think is also incredibly healthy. It is even that critical mind that I would say women need to cultivate generally in terms of themselves so that we can wake up for our mother Gaia and for our children and become the leaders that Gaia wants us to be. So how do we identify this unconscious absorption that women are enculturated towards that just has us soaking up all of the angst and all of the anxiety and all of the stress that is not just in our families or just in our homes, but you know, in the entire world around us and the way that we can become conscious of it is by examining it by using our capacities for awareness and intelligence and consciousness and focus. Our ability to focus, we have to bring up that capacity to focus so that we can differentiate ourselves from what is going on around us and find our voice, find the particular role that Gaia has in mind for us as forces to be of service in any variety of ways. It doesn’t have to be big, it can just be with one other individual, one child.

How Gaia is working through us for the salvation of humanity and of the earth, so we have to be able to focus. I have been saying this about women, to women, for women, with women, for a long time. It’s that ability to zero in on what is the truth to examine and in the webinar that I did, I put forth my concept of deep journaling, which is just a way of using writing to exercise the critical mind and examine how we’re making our choices, what is it that we’re feeling, not just by recording it or documenting it, but by really inquiring into it and I would say that’s one of the regenerative capacities that was a gift to me by my extremely adverse childhood experiences because I was so unsafe in the family and the environment in which I was forced to live that I became very introverted and very skilled at tracking everything within me and around me as a way to feel some sense of safety and stability and I’ve never lost that. That has been honed and refined and educated throughout my development, mostly at my own instigation, so the ability to be curious about ones self.

This is a very animal instinct, you know how animals really inquire into everything. They’re so curious about everything. That’s really a part of the healthy primitive brain and we want to regain that. We want to learn that again because we had it as children and adverse early experiences stripped that away from us. I couldn’t do that as a child. I couldn’t do that in a physical way. I couldn’t just explore and be curious in my movements because that wasn’t safe, but I never stopped being curious internally and I really believe, Lisa, that saved my life and I realize that as a neuroscientist when I saw the interaction between dopamine and oxytocin, you know, they’re very interactive, so I didn’t have too much oxytocin. I had a little bit from my grandpa, but there wasn’t much oxytocin flowing in my home when I was growing up, but I contained within my own little private secret world, I contained a lot of dopamine. I just kept circulating my dopamine and that dopamine, that curiosity ultimately gave me the capacity to self generate my own oxytocin with itself and so you could say that I’ve continued to develop that, the ability to be self inquiring and the ability to be creative and the ability to track responses to circumstances and transform them into their most optimum outcome.

So that’s all part of the self care that I teach, but what’s happening for me in this third act of life is that it’s not just about self care. By taking care of myself in this way, by nurturing my intelligence, by learning to focus, by focusing more and more all of the time, looking more and more deeply into myself all of the time and allowing shifts to happen spontaneous as the result of a really heightened sorting ability, I am of more and more service to my blessed world that is on the brink of disaster.

So self care is really what allows me at this juncture to make the transition from “I to We” so that I become even more of a servant by serving myself. So I hope, my hope really in what I’m saying to you right now and what I’m doing in my life right now is to be a model to other women to the best of my ability and I really say this with a lot of humility, because I feel very guided in this, but to be a model for the beauty of elder-hood, to be a model for the beauty of this practice of focused self-inquiry and self-care that is urgent right now. So we want to be urgent without being desperate, you know, we want to slow down to speed up. You know, this capacity to really steer yourself forward as a brilliant female contributor to this world that we’re living in. That’s what I want to be a model of for women.

LISA REAGAN: This sustainable healthcare model that you’re advocating for and that will be presented at the conference?

STEPHANIE MINES: Yes. The sustainable healthcare model that I’m developing more and more everyday and then I just applied to a fellowship to develop even further is a model of the kinds of resources that can be sustained by an individual, that can be sustained by a family, that can be sustained by a community that is cut off potentially from the western medicine that we need for, you know, the acute situations when it’s a miracle, like my husband’s heart attack, for instance.

The kinds of self care that can keep an individual, a family, a community healthy despite the difficult circumstances they might be in, the challenges, and the lack of access to institutionalized care. That is the sustainable health model. It involves combining traditional medicines that work for indigenous communities beautifully and that are in some cases ancient with evolution and improvements on those that have developed like my own TARA approach, which takes an ancient Japanese energy medicine system and transforms it into trauma-informed touch so that kind of evolution adapts these ancient traditions for the current times. All of that goes into the sustainable health medicine bag and what I will do also with the model is train practitioners in the dissemination of these sustainable health interventions.

The New Sustainable Healthcare Model

LISA REAGAN: So speak for a moment about what we were talking about right before we started recording, you were saying that this kind of sustainable healthcare model is really needed by white westerners and talk for a little bit about how you were just in New Zealand and how that was a different experience.

STEPHANIE MINES: Yeah. Yeah. You’re a great weaver, Lisa and I love the way that you’re paying attention.

LISA REAGAN: Laughs.

STEPHANIE MINES: I love it and I am so grateful for it. So, yes, I was just privileged to be invited in to a beautiful Mauti community called Parihaka on the north island of New Zealand and the district that’s called Taranaki named for Mount Taranaki and Parihaka is now being known and people haven’t known about it. It is just coming out now that Parihaka was a center for non-violent passive resistance when the British were raping and really destroying basically trying to commit genocide against the Mauti so that they could acquire their beautiful beautiful land and New Zealand is exemplary in making restitution for that more and more.

There’s a long way to go yet, but it’s happening and it is somewhat evidenced by how I was received into the Parihaka community, totally unexpectedly and totally with me being raw and wordless, really. I don’t speak Mauti. It’s an incredible language and I want to learn it, but everything that I was exposed to was in Mauti, so I felt like an outsider but it turned out that I wasn’t. So what I learned about was the incredible health of the Mauti community itself. So I think for white people, this sense of being healed in the heart of community is unusual. Even though I come from really an old world family myself, myself and my family we are all immigrants from eastern Europe, a very traditional peasant eastern European Jewish family, but we were so fragmented by being in America that the core of comfort and the core of sustainability that is the truth of what the family is or what the community is was gone and was lost.

People were so incredibly damaged by being, you know, ostracized and beaten and tossed out and torn asunder and stripped from their traditions that instead of the family being a sanctuary, it became another territory of war, very much like what I describe in They were Families: How War Comes Home. But in the Mauti family, even though the Mauti people have suffered the ravages of a colonization just like the Native Americans have in the US, the family is really a shelter. It is really a source of incredible healing and knowing that family is there for you and also the healing traditions within that family, which include nature as the primary one, the natural world, listening to, being part of, connecting with the natural world, which is something that I insist upon as being a component of the conference, Climate Change and Consciousness.

That everyone there, whether you’re Bill McKibben or you’re a registered participant, you will be exposed to deepening relationship with the natural world. That is innate in the Mauti community. You know, Mount Taranaki is not the mountain that is beautiful out there. Mount Taranaki is a relative. It is part of the family and the songs the language of the community are instruments of healing. I was so blessed to be asked to do some healing of trauma in community on a day at Parihaka that was organized for women peacekeepers from throughout Aotearoa and I saw as I was working with a traumatized family in a whole collective situation, as I was using the TARA approach, the healing interventions of the TARA approach, at certain moments, the whole group, Lisa, the whole group would start to sing. I can send you some photos of this.

LISA REAGAN: I would love that.

STEPHANIE MINES: It was so incredibly beautiful. It was hard for me. I mean, I didn’t even try as the practitioner supposedly conducted this, to keep from wailing. I was working with a mother and a daughter and as the trauma issues surfaced at certain junctures, the whole group would start to sing in Mauti. So the songs were part of the healing. The circle itself, the gathering, became part of the healing. So these songs, even the youngest girl who was there knew the songs. These songs have been kept alive. What songs do we have? What songs would we sing to each other as a source of healing? So that’s what I mean. That’s an example of what I mean when I say that the sustainable health paradigm will include what I learned from the Mauti, but it is needed not by the Mauti, but by those of us who have lost that kind of connection with the natural world and also with community.

LISA REAGAN: Right. Well, my family comes from farming family and standing around pianos and singing together and having meals together is something I have written about on Kindred as one of the inspirations for the work I do. The name of the article is My Grandma Is Not A Hippie. All of the stuff I want to do has gotten me labeled as a hippy, but my grandmother did it and she wasn’t a hippy. It was just how people lived closer to community.

STEPHANIE MINES: That’s so beautiful. That’s not what we’re going to go back to, but it’s what we’re going to bring along, because it’s restoring that with the upgrade to consciousness that needs to accompany it. That’s a beautiful reference because it was one moment when I was at Parihaka and there are certain ceremonies that are required and they are all done in Mauti for entering a space. I don’t know the rituals, I’ve never done them. I was being asked to participate in a ritual that was bringing me into a space and at a certain point, someone said, now you’re supposed to sing a song.

Someone said to me, in English obviously, well now that you’ve gotten this far in this process, now you have to sing a song and I was just gobsmacked, because number one I have a terrible voice, I don’t sing well, and I don’t know any songs. Whatever song I know, I thought nobody really wants to hear me sing it, so I was stupefied and then finally just out of my mouth came this Yiddish folk song that my grandmother sang me when I was little and I didn’t even know that I remembered it. It was in Yiddish and I just let it out and then it was only later that I learned that step in the ritual was one in which you’re supposed to sing a song from the land from which you came.

LISA REAGAN: Oh gosh, wow. Well, we have to do a whole other call on this because as somebody who has worked to create community and bring community together in the US, one of the many books that I am finishing or else, talks about my, and not just mine, but other people’s efforts in the United States to bring people together and what we saw. I know Darcia Narvaez has written a lot about neurobiology and this sort of thing in her work as well. In America, because we’re almost like prime to belong to a cult. We want someone to tell us what to do and what to say I think and how to feel. So the minute we roll out and say these are sacred ceremonial rituals and we’re going to access our spirit and this piece of ourselves and come together, what I’ve found in the past… it wasn’t always true but it is true enough to make it significant is that people wanted to create life rafts and then, okay, this is how it’s done and this is the ritual, instead of there was some missing step there of consistent community and heart opening experience. It’s like the experiential piece isn’t there enough for us to create the new reality that we’re still in our heads.

STEPHANIE MINES: Yeah, I totally agree.

LISA REAGAN: So I’ve seen that, yeah. But we have such a long journey ahead of us and I’m so glad that you’re there holding the space that you are. I just wonder if you could take a moment and tell our listeners anything you want to say about the conference and then where to find you online.

STEPHANIE MINES: Yeah. That’s actually a really good segway, because I big part of the conference is very much on this topic of building community, because exactly as you are saying, we need to learn how to do that. There are going to be people at the conference who know far better than I. I haven’t built community. I am learning about community right now through my work with this conference and this is part of me remaking myself in my third act here. I always thought what I really wanted was a lot of isolation and independence so I could write my poetry and my novels and not be bothered by other people. It turns out really that’s not how creativity really flourishes. It flourishes in community. So that’s a big part of climate change and consciousness, so the conference is “Climate Change and Consciousness: Our Legacy for the Earth.” The website is http://ccc19.org but I want to also emphasize that this is not just about a conference where we have these major presenters like Bill McKibben and Vandana Shiva and Naomi Klein and other stellar speakers. We have all of that.

We have a great banner of incredible people who are going to be presenting, but we also have incredible participants, all of whom will be presenters at some point in the conference. We have incredible workshops. But even beyond that, I see this as a movement that leads to what happens when the conference is over. That’s what is important. That’s when the communities manifest. That’s when people implement the brilliant ideas, the networks that are generated at the event itself and I am working now to the best of my ability to make sure that some structure for that action plan is in place. I am very much emphasizing the sustainable health component, but all of the other components also have to be in place. It’s a huge undertaking. There are people who want to help me and learn about the sustainable health component through my paradigm of the TARA approach. You can reach me on that website, http://tara-approach.org and through my personal email, which you’ll find on that website and I welcome a response from those who would be interested in supporting, for instance by sponsoring people who can’t afford to attend. I’ve just been able to get some funding for some Mauti youth. There’s a huge youth component to this conference. Youth are a centerpiece to this event.

Every aspect of this event is given to me in guidance, so this whole conference was given to me as an assignment and it was very specific, so it was spiritually directed and anyone who wants to see the eight principles of this conference which were dictated to me, I am happy to share that with you. So the concept of climate change and consciousness is actually a movement. It will go on beyond the event itself and there are also precursor events occurring, such as the webinar I just spoke of and I am doing another webinar on April 21 which will be about the relationship between the human nervous system and Gaia’s. Yeah, you’re invited to that Lisa if you’d like to attend.

LISA REAGAN: That sounds wonderful.

STEPHANIE MINES: Yeah. It’s going to be a lot of fun and it is going to include a visualization and meditation that allows us to hookup with the Gaia and nervous system so that we can respond to her needs more readily and that’s on my website already. We just I think posted it today. So http://tara-approach.org and http://ccc19.org. We welcome everyone.

LISA REAGAN: Well, thank you so much. I am so in awe of you and 35 years devoted to this territory and that you can report back to this degree, it just blows me away. I read your work and I realize the depth and breadth that you’re covering that I just really really deeply deeply appreciate that you have done this. You have held this space.

STEPHANIE MINES: Thank you, thank you.

LISA REAGAN: I would like to tell our listeners, if you would like to read the transcript and any pictures that Stephanie is going to share with us, you can find them at http://kindredmedia.org. I don’t know where you are going to run across this recording, but http://kindredmedia.org is where you can find the transcript and all kinds of resources that I will tack at the bottom as well for the conference and other works that you have to share.

STEPHANIE MINES: I want to acknowledge you Lisa because I really want to honor this journalistic mind, this inquisitive mind of yours. I want to support you in writing your book or books I should say and I want to thank you for hearing me and seeing me and acknowledging me and recognizing me and giving me this opportunity to communicate my mission and my directive to the world.

LISA REAGAN: Oh, thank you so much. It’s wonderful and you are in my community, so we all get to play in the sand box together as I like to say. It’s wonderful.

]]>http://kindredmedia.org/2018/04/consciousness-and-climate-change-an-interview-with-stephanie-mines-phd/feed/0Battling Over Birth: Black Women And The Maternal Health Care Crisis – Part Threehttp://kindredmedia.org/2018/02/battling-birth-black-women-maternal-health-care-crisis-part-three/
http://kindredmedia.org/2018/02/battling-birth-black-women-maternal-health-care-crisis-part-three/#respondThu, 08 Feb 2018 22:25:59 +0000http://kindredmedia.org/?p=21119This is part three of a three part series and excerpt from the new book, Battling Over Birth: Black Women and the Maternal Health Care Crisis. Part One: Prenatal Care Barriers Part Two: Stress, Pregnancy and the “Strong Black Woman” Syndrome Part Three: Midwifery Model of Care “Battling over Birth is a critical and timely […]

]]>This is part three of a three part series and excerpt from the new book, Battling Over Birth: Black Women and the Maternal Health Care Crisis.Please support our 20 year old, award-winning, nonprofit work to Share the New Story of Childhood, Parenthood and the Human Family.

Part Three: Midwifery Model of Care

“Battling over Birth is a critical and timely resource for understanding black women’s birthing experiences in the United States, a country where black women’s lives—and the lives they create—are at much greater risk of death and injury than those of non-black women … By distilling the common and diverse threads from over 100 black women, the BWBJ researchers have woven a multi-faceted tapestry that reflects what black women view as important and central to optimal birth experiences. Their recommendations for improving care and outcomes are grounded in black women’s authoritative knowledge. … This wonderful, important, necessary research by and for black women points in the direction that black women think we should go to ensure they have safe, healthy, and satisfying birth experiences and outcomes. We need to listen and act.”

Battling Over Birth: Black Women And The Maternal Health Care Crisis

Part Three

Midwifery Model of Care

In a context where ob-gyns provide both routine care for women experiencing normal, healthy pregnancies as well as specialist care for those experiencing complicated pregnancies, it is unsurprising that many of the women in the study reported that their prenatal visits with ob-gyns were hurried, pressuring and impersonal. In contrast to the U.S. maternal healthcare system, which is dominated by ob-gyns, many countries including Australia, the UK, Sweden and Norway rely on midwives to provide care for the majority of pregnancies. Ob-gyns are thus able to focus their energies on providing individualized care for the minority of cases in which pregnancy complications arise.

There is a long history of African American midwifery, dating back to the West African captives who brought traditional birthing knowledge to the Americas.23 These women became known as “granny midwives,” and they delivered the majority of babies in the South during slavery and post-emancipation. From the 1920s, white male physicians and politicians launched a campaign to move birth from the home into the hospital and to replace midwives with obstetricians. Granny midwives were the victims of a racist/sexist smear campaign that alleged that they were ignorant, unhygienic, superstitious and backwards.24 At first, only white middle-class women were wooed into the hospitals, but after the advent of Medicare, and the desegregation of hospitals in the 1950s, midwife-assisted home births were gradually eliminated in favor of medicalized birth for all women. Today, small numbers of black midwives walk in the footsteps of the granny midwives, offering home births. In addition, predominantly white CNMs staff hospital prenatal clinics and labor and delivery wards.25 However, many black people in the U.S. today believe that modern, safe birth is synonymous with physician-attended hospital birth and see midwifery either as the privilege of white women, or as a relic of an era when black people had no choice but to birth at home and were denied access to segregated hospitals even in cases of life-threatening pregnancy complications. This complex history shows up today in black women’s access to and attitudes toward midwifery care.

Our participants received prenatal care in a range of settings. These included clinic-based care in an ob-gyn or family practice, hospital-based care with an ob-gyn, ob-gyn/midwife mixed hospital clinics, clinic visits with a midwife, group prenatal care at a hospital and home visits with a midwife in anticipation of giving birth in a birthing center or at home. Twenty-three percent of our participants received their prenatal care exclusively with a midwife, or with a midwife-doula team. 15% received a combination of physician and midwifery care. In California, medical researchers estimate that 9-12 percent of pregnant individuals see a CNM.26 Nationwide, 87% see an ob-gyn. However, the proportion of pregnant people receiving care from a midwife, nurse practitioner or physician assistant has grown 48 percent in the past decade27

Characteristics of Midwifery Prenatal Care

Birthing While Black: An Interview With Midwife Jennie Joseph

A common theme among the participants’ stories was the sharp contrast between prenatal care provided by an ob-gyn and that provided by a midwife.28 Martha experienced midwifery care with a team of midwives from a birthing center after two earlier pregnancies during which she had received the standard short prenatal appointments with an ob-gyn. She compared the short, impersonal ob-gyn visits with the holistic, relational and intimate care she received from
the midwives:

The midwives were amazing. They asked all kinds of questions. Having had appointments with ob-gyns for most of my life that were 10, 5 or 10 minutes. When they asked me, “What do you envision for your birth, and what do you want to eat, and how can we help you and what things about your house do you want changed and who can help you?” It was like, “Oh you’re a friend.” Which was amazing. — Martha, home birth, vaginal birth

By referring to her midwife as a friend, Martha demonstrates the trust and rapport between them, characteristics that lead a pregnant individual to persist with prenatal care and follow the advice she receives from a medical professional. Samirah, who experienced parallel care with both an ob-gyn and a midwife, also noted the relational and intimate nature of her midwife visits. In addition, she revealed the lack of trust created in a hierarchical and inflexible approach to prenatal care. Rather than caring for her as a whole person, she perceived her ob-gyn care as geared toward preparing her for a highly medicalized birth:

My appointments were always so different, I would go to the hospital and it was very rigid, and you know, charting and preparing me for a C-section, you know it was always like WAH! Run out as fast as I could. And my midwife’s appointments were like on the couch and comfortable and you know, like talking about my day, always so different. — Samirah, 37, home birth, vaginal birth

Text to SUBSCRIBE or click on the image to subscribe with email

Samirah also appreciated the lack of pressure that she experienced with a midwife. Key to her satisfaction with her prenatal care was the midwife’s commitment to empowering her and her partner to make healthy, informed decisions for themselves. Dalia contrasted this with her ob-gyn who she felt treated her as a disobedient child whenever she disagreed with a proposed course of action:

We found a good midwife. I was not married to having the baby at home. I love that idea but if something goes wrong and we need to go to the hospital my concern is that I have a care provider who has a relationship and has some perspective on what I’m capable of to be my advocate in there. It was fantastic, it was totally different [with the midwife]. I had my appointments at home, I had my baby with me and had my husband there and spent an hour each time talking about whatever. Having things presented to us and choices. And not to feel like I was the rebel every time there was a recommendation, you should do this; your baby’s small at 37 weeks so now you should go have an ultrasound every day, a stress test every day. It was like I was disobeying her. So it was totally different having a midwife. Very relaxed. — Dalia, 40, home birth, vaginal birth

Many of the participants who were able to access midwifery care observed a difference in the philosophy of pregnancy care between ob-gyns and midwives. In their opinion, ob-gyns treated pregnancy like a medical problem or crisis, and tended to utilize numerous and unnecessary interventions that were not tailored to the specific health needs and cultural preferences of the pregnant individual. Participants believed that ob-gyns used fear to ensure compliance with medical advice. In contrast, midwives were more open to exploring alternative approaches to ensure that the pregnant person achieved and maintained optimal health. They used relationship building, trust and listening to build consensus rather than fear and coercion:

And I, that’s kind of the feeling I got, that her advice was based solely on fear. And that’s not usually how I make my decisions. My intuition kind of rose up and I was like, “this is a person who is going to treat my birth like a crisis” And I’m not ready to be in an emergency situation with my birth. I don’t want to feel that. So I walked out of there and I started Yelping “midwife.” — Brianna, 38, home birth, vaginal birth

I was going to [HMO name]; it was a very impersonal experience, that’s what turned me off from the hospital. I knew a hospital was only for an emergency… They wanted to do the diabetes screening and I didn’t feel it was necessary because of the way I took care of myself. I never did it. Every time I went she was like, you have to take it, this is really important. They have all this fear attached to it. They’re just pushing it on you and I’m like no I’m not doing it. And they would call and leave these messages like. We noticed that you didn’t do the test. So then they asked me, are you on prenatals. And I told them I’m not doing no vitamin [pill], I’m taking in this, and all that, I’m telling them about these herbs and vegetables and they asked where does it come from, they don’t know anything. So I called [black midwife’s name] and it was such as relief to have a midwife come to you in your environment and make it so comfortable for you so that you don’t even have to think too much, everything just flows. — Aliyah, 21, home birth, vaginal birth

How Racism Harms Pregnant Women – And What Can Help

Rather than focusing narrowly on the pregnant individual’s physical health condition, midwifery care is holistic, and recognizes that a person’s mental, emotional and social wellbeing are affected by and can impact their pregnancy.29 Our participants noted that their midwife helped them to work through difficult emotional or relationship issues that were affecting their emotional preparedness for birth. Amara switched from an ob-gyn practice to a midwife when she was eight months pregnant because she learned that her ob-gyn could quite likely not be present at her birth, and she did not believe in any case that her ob-gyn supported her vision of a natural birth. The emotional care that she received from her midwife was critically important in helping her to release childhood trauma that was triggered when she entered the hospital for childbirth classes:

My last three weeks of prenatal care was heavenly. I had no idea. I mean, the level of beautiful care I got from my midwife, which I should have had my whole pregnancy. Just going, like you said, to a beautiful space, which felt like a women’s center. She’d be like, oh take this stick and pee in the bathroom, honey. Look on the little chart and tell me what it says. It was all like, self-help, do it yourself. We would chat and I said it was a cross between going to visit my grandmother, a therapist, and maybe a nurse. She would talk to me and she was the first person who—I had gone to a birthing class at the hospital and I had had an emotional meltdown. I had been really upset afterwards and I didn’t know what it was about. I was talking to her three weeks before I was due, it became clear to me that I was given up. I was birthed but then my mother left me in the hospital.

What was coming up for me was all that body memory of babies in hospitals and being abandoned and all this kind of thing. I would have been an emotional wreck if I was trying to give birth in a hospital without realizing that was going on for me. So my midwife acted as my therapist and helped me to talk it through. She was this very kind of petite woman but she was very hardcore and she just said, “You’ve got to leave that behind. That’s not your birth story anymore. You’re having a new birth story.” It was just putting it on the table and sharing that was really powerful. By the time I got to my birth, which was a week later from the due date. It was four weeks later from moving to this midwife. I felt prepared emotionally. — Amara, 41, hospital, vaginal birth

Hailey found her midwife’s assistance in navigating a challenging relationship with the father of her unborn child essential to her emotional wellbeing during her last trimester. She also appreciated how the midwife worked to support and empower the partner or in this case ex-partner as well as the pregnant person.

I ended up finding my midwife when I was 30 weeks pregnant. She was amazing… She had a great team. They really took care of us from the prenatal part and she really helped with relationship issues, because we were broken up, “How do we put this together? Do we even want to proceed as a family? Or should we just be friends? What is his role going to be as a father?” But she made sure to include my husband in the entire process, and he felt empowered as well as I. — Hailey, 31, home birth, vaginal birth

This is a three part series and excerpt from the new book, Battling Over Birth: Black Women and the Maternal Health Care Crisis.

Part Three: Midwifery Model of Care

Join the LiberateBlackBirth Campaign!With the release of Battling Over Birth, Black Women Birthing Justice are launching a campaign to transform the maternal health-care system in California. Join us!! Together we can ensure that black women and pregnant individuals have the right to birth with safety and autonomy, where, how and with whom they choose.

]]>http://kindredmedia.org/2018/02/battling-birth-black-women-maternal-health-care-crisis-part-three/feed/0Battling Over Birth: Black Women And The Maternal Health Care Crisis – Part Twohttp://kindredmedia.org/2018/02/battling-birth-black-women-maternal-health-care-crisis-part-two/
http://kindredmedia.org/2018/02/battling-birth-black-women-maternal-health-care-crisis-part-two/#respondThu, 08 Feb 2018 22:25:48 +0000http://kindredmedia.org/?p=21113This is part two of a three part series and excerpt from the new book, Battling Over Birth: Black Women and the Maternal Health Care Crisis. Part One: Prenatal Care Barriers Part Two: Stress, Pregnancy and the “Strong Black Woman” Syndrome Part Three: Midwifery Model of Care “Battling over Birth is a critical and timely […]

]]>This is part two of a three part series and excerpt from the new book, Battling Over Birth: Black Women and the Maternal Health Care Crisis.Please support our 20 year old, award-winning, nonprofit work to “Share the New Story of Childhood, Parenthood and the Human Family”

Part Two: Stress, Pregnancy and the “Strong Black Woman” Syndrome

“Battling over Birth is a critical and timely resource for understanding black women’s birthing experiences in the United States, a country where black women’s lives—and the lives they create—are at much greater risk of death and injury than those of non-black women … By distilling the common and diverse threads from over 100 black women, the BWBJ researchers have woven a multi-faceted tapestry that reflects what black women view as important and central to optimal birth experiences. Their recommendations for improving care and outcomes are grounded in black women’s authoritative knowledge. … This wonderful, important, necessary research by and for black women points in the direction that black women think we should go to ensure they have safe, healthy, and satisfying birth experiences and outcomes. We need to listen and act.”

Battling Over Birth: Black Women and the Maternal Health Care Crisis

Part Two

Stress, Pregnancy and the “Strong Black Woman” Syndrome

Chronic stress and psychological distress have numerous impacts on women’s health, including negatively affecting reproductive health. Researchers have found that stress and traumatic life events during pregnancy contribute to preterm birth (less than 37 weeks), and low birthweight. 14 Researchers have also investigated the impact of racism, including lifelong experiences of racism, chronic stress and posttraumatic stress disorder. Several studies suggest a complex relationship between lifetime exposure to racism, stress, trauma and prenatal depression that may trigger pregnancy complications.15

The participants in our study were very aware of the impact of stress on their wellbeing in general and on their pregnancies in specific. Participants identified four sources of significant stress in their lives: racism and environmental stress, economic and job related stress, parenting stress, relationship and intimate violence-related stress. For the women in our study, stress is not related to one stressful incident, such as the loss of a job or death in the family. Instead, their lives are marked by interlocking stress factors related to their multiple roles as workers, providers, homemakers, parents and elder caregivers. Malika articulates how navigating these multiple responsibilities in the context of a society structured by racism/sexism can lead to feelings of overwhelm and depression:

My husband didn’t have a job, I was working for this terrible, racist school, I was pregnant and not feeling well because I was so tired and I was working two jobs… I would fall asleep while driving. I would come home from work and fall asleep at 4 and not wake up ‘til the next day at 6 am… It was a very stressful pregnancy because not that long after my husband lost his job, he got a new job thankfully out here. He left and it was me and my older son, and my mom was sick. I was driving back and forth between Atlanta and Savannah, which is about 4 hours, to help her. She was going through chemo. It was just, like, my world was ending. It felt like my world was ending while I was pregnant. I cried a lot. I mean, I would just come home from work and get into bed and cry because my mother was dying and I was alone and we were going to lose our house and who cares about a house, but at that point it felt like we were—none of us comes from a lot so we felt like we were, I guess, upwardly mobile—we were going to have things for our kids that we never had. So, it just felt like our whole world, you know like I was losing my whole world. So I couldn’t even focus on my pregnancy. It was just a kind of another thing on the list of things that were stressful. — Malika, 33, hospital birth

Despite an end to formal residential segregation, continuing race and class barriers mean that black women are more likely to live in neighborhoods impacted by poverty, substandard housing and violence. This can lead to stressors related to the environment in which a pregnant individual lives:

It was such a hard year. My husband and I moved out of our home in Oakland that year. Because we had a stray bullet hit the house. It went through four walls and landed on our piano. And we come home looking at this bullet on the piano, thinking, we got children in this house. This is supposed to be our safe space, our home. We’d been burglarized two times so we moved from this big house to 800 square feet student housing. Four of us already and we wanted to add a fifth one. — Dalia, 40, home birth, vaginal birth

Birthing While Black: An Interview With Midwife Jennie Joseph

Since the 1980s, our welfare net for vulnerable women, families and communities has been eroded, while massive government funding has gone into a war on drugs that has pursued punishment rather than treatment as a strategy for addressing substance abuse, and the construction of a multi-billion dollar prison-industrial complex. Low-income black women are impacted by this shift in public spending in a number of ways: we pick up the caring labor for family members that the state no longer provides, we do healing work in families and communities shattered by drug use and gun violence, and we are disproportionately incarcerated for “survival crimes” such as welfare fraud, sex work and low-level drug sales. Dana’s tragic story speaks to the stress that this hostile environment can create for pregnant individuals:

I lost the baby. At two months. I went to the bathroom and went to pee and some chunks came out. And when I’m walking some more comes out in my panties. I just lost my father last year four days after my birthday… My brother was murdered in March. Shot 34 times so its like ALL of this. My sister just recently got out the hospital. She got a spinal infection that was going to her brain. The whole time she is going back and forth to work and the hospital thinking she’s having headaches and they just sending her back home. Next thing she knows she can’t get up and walk!… So ALL of this is last year… I went to jail over and over again last year. I just finished fighting my case the day before my birthday. — Dana

As workers and providers, black women have to navigate the work world during their pregnancies. Several of our participants described work as a site of considerable stress, in particular where they experienced racism and pregnancy-related discrimination. One participant shared a saga of job discrimination that started when she told her employer that her “high risk” pregnancy could require additional time off work:

Over 40 and the third pregnancy in a year, my doctor was watching me very closely. So I told my manager because I had to go to more appointments and a week after I told him I was pregnant, he demoted me. So he demoted me, I’m going to say three levels. I’m a project manager and he basically made me an admin assistant for my group. — Maha,40+, hospital, vaginal birth.

Join the LiberateBlackBirth Campaign! With the release of Battling Over Birth, Black Women Birthing Justice are launching a campaign to transform the maternal health-care system in California. Join us!! Together we can ensure that black women and pregnant individuals have the right to birth with safety and autonomy, where, how and with whom they choose.

Maha subsequently went on disability leave when she was two-and-a-half months pregnant, she returned to a hostile workplace where she was targeted with close monitoring and ultimately accepted a severance package to avoid further stress:

This is how it is. I’m a woman of color and this is just how it is and I’m just dealing with it. And I never really cried or got upset because I didn’t want to impact my baby. [baby gurgling][Sniffs] Sorry. But if I think about it now, and its been six weeks now. I think its now that I can actually have these emotions because I was just like, the whole time, I’m not going to let this bother me. I’m going to have my baby. So I was discriminated against quite a bit during my pregnancy. — Maha, 40+, hospital, vaginal birth.

Relationships with partners and parents were also sources of significant stress in the lives of some of our participants. Several women reported experiencing intimate partner violence and sexual abuse during their pregnancies. For one participant, the domestic violence she was living in was a factor in choosing to terminate a pregnancy, however after inadvertently getting pregnant again, she felt unable to leave her abusive husband:

I had an abortion. My ex-husband was really— As soon as we got married his temper just increased. And the idea- I just kept picturing being pregnant and being thrown down the stairs or being slapped or just I couldn’t imagine being pregnant and bringing another child in and so I got an abortion. And right when I was getting a divorce, well we were talking about getting a divorce, I found out I was pregnant, so we stayed… — Kaela, 31, hospital, vaginal birth

Our sexual intimacy was very violent and he would like hold pillows over [my face] and it was just like really, really messed up. And so that was like a very depressing–I just kind of like went into another place, just tell myself just to survive because I didn’t have anywhere else to go because, you know, I had already broken my family’s heart because you know, I changed everything, you know. Just a little bit of background of how I was raised in the church, I just didn’t know how to survive in the world, and so even when I got pregnant with her, I just left my job. I didn’t know anything about leave of absence. I didn’t know anything about pregnancy leave. I just left. I was just like “Oh well I done did it. I done messed it all up.’’ And I just went into this other place just to survive and so he was the only person that I could depend on, so I just had to deal with it, you know? — Sage, 36, hospital, vaginal birth

Birth In America For Black Mothers – A Documentary “the AMERICAN dream”

The women in our study who experienced violence from an intimate partner had very few choices in dealing with the violence in their lives. None of the women reported knowing about support services or resources for black women living with intimate violence, and reporting the violence to the authorities (police or medical professionals) was not considered a safe option.16 As Dana shares:

I’m like, “What you trying to say? That this ain’t your baby? Cause you’re the only I’ve slept with you know and all this.” Next thing you know and I’m you know just do whatever you gotta do. He watching me. Do whatever you gotta do. Bop. [Punches her fist] Knocks me. [All gasp]. He knocks me to the ground. So I just–I tumble. I didn’t know what I looked like. I get up. I check to make sure all my teeth was there. I wasn’t going to look up without no teeth so I’m like all right. I don’t realize this was all swollen [gesturing to face]. It was close to my nose, which affected all of this. So all of this was all like two black eyes, bruises all over my cheeks. But I don’t know this though… So I am going from my mom’s house to my adoptive parents’… I got there and realized–Yeah. They’re like, “You gotta check the baby and make sure the baby is okay. You fell pretty hard and stuff like that.” And I’m just like, “No.” Cause I didn’t even want to face the fact if something is wrong. So I didn’t go to the doctor. — Dana

An important mitigating factor in assessing the impact of stress is the amount of support that a pregnant person receives in her social environment. Many of our participants reported that they found it difficult to ask for help, and believed that they should be able to handle things on their own. This belief can be traced to the “Black Superwoman” or “Strong Black Woman” syndrome.17 Abrams et al define the “Strong Black Woman” as a socialized and internalized cultural gender schema with the following characteristics: “a provider and caretaker who is resistant to vulnerability or dependency, displays strength, suppresses emotions, succeeds despite inadequate resources, and assumes responsibility as a community agent.”18 Rosario clearly articulated her adherence to the SBW schema:

Other races be killing themselves over stuff. We’re strong people, we’re not gonna kill ourselves cause a man wants to leave us. And we have to raise our kid on our own. We just really strong.And we get it done. — Rosario, 20, hospital, vaginal birth

While strength is an important attribute in navigating racism/sexism and economic injustice, and at the time supporting family members and maintaining community responsibilities, the need to be strong at all times can also lead to depression, isolation and self-judgment, as well as unhealthy coping/stuffing strategies. The Sharing Circles that we conducted for this research were a space in which women often felt their feelings about difficult or traumatic experiences for the first time, and found a supportive space where their pain could be held and honored:

Three weeks prior to my birth, I had buried my mother. [Tearfully] I wasn’t supposed to cry… I was working fulltime. And I was looking for a house and I was painting my bathroom, and I was trying to be superwoman. Everything I taught my clients not to be. And I have sisters and I have support and I still have not learned to ask for help. I was trying to be strong for my dad, because this was his life partner of almost 50 years. And although I was the youngest, I’m the one that took care of my mom and I didn’t want my dad to join her, so I didn’t cry when we buried my mom. I delivered the obituary. I didn’t cry because I didn’t want my father to fall apart. And I didn’t realize I was grieving during my labor. — Amina, 42, hospital, unplanned cesarean

Given the significant stressors and lack of support in their lives, some of our participants terminated or considered terminating an unplanned pregnancy. Other women looked for ways to bring as much self-care and calm into their lives as possible. For many of our participants, their spiritual practice or belief in a Higher Power and/or ancestors provided them with a source of strength, peace and guidance.

There was so much anxiety throughout the pregnancy, so much stress, and I think the birthing process also reflected that stress. But there was a lot of luck, or divination. The Creator looking out, ancestors looking out for us in the process too. — Dalia, 40, home birth, vaginal birth

I did the Hypnobabies program. I don’t know if anybody’s heard of it. It’s really just like self-guided meditation. They say it’s hypnosis, but if you are familiar with meditating, it’s like a woman guiding you through a deep meditation and giving you positive affirmations the entire time. You kind of get the idea… You just put yourself in a deep relaxation. And I think that is also–It’s when I started doing that that I kind of like let go. Like all of those anxieties about being pregnant, having a baby, and it not being the right time and all of that just kind of dissipated because I was able to ground myself. — Tyra, 26, hospital, vaginal birth

For other women, the knowledge that they could create a safe space for their child’s birth and first year was a source of inspiration:

I wanted a birth that was quiet, because everything was so chaotic outside of—inside my body I felt very calm, but outside my body it was very chaotic. So because I felt like God had given me this gift, that he was… not going to make it more difficult than I could handle. I wanted it, I wanted my son to be born into peace. — Joanna, 32, birth center, vaginal birth

Black women experience multiple stressors during pregnancy, including adverse life events that are caused or exacerbated by structural and interpersonal racial/sexual discrimination and violence. Black women’s strength and ability to survive and navigate these stressors is a considerable asset. However, the “Strong Black Woman” syndrome can also be detrimental, where it prevents us from honoring our feelings or seeking or accepting help. Accessible, culturally-humble prenatal services for pregnant black women should address women’s barriers to seeking help. They should also include referrals for counseling and practical assistance for dealing with intimate partner violence, parenting challenges, racial/sexual discrimination in the workplace, finding adequate housing, and dealing with trauma and loss.

Miscarriage, Stillbirth and Resiliency

The U.S. has been described as a “death-phobic society”, in which deep, meaningful engagement with the dying, grief and loss is replaced by the voyeuristic consumption of graphic violence and mass death in TV and movies.19 As a result, the fact that every pregnancy does not end with a healthy baby is a reality that is rarely spoken about. The U.S. National Center for Health Statistics defines fetal death, or miscarriage, as the spontaneous death of a fetus any time during pregnancy. A stillbirth is defined as a fetal death later in pregnancy, after at least 20 weeks of gestation. In the U.S., black women are twice as likely as white women to experience a stillbirth. Even where black women receive similar prenatal care, we experience higher rates of stillbirth, especially preterm stillbirth.20

Several of the participants in our study reported having experienced unwanted/“spontaneous” pregnancy loss. Pregnancy loss carried a wide range of meanings for our participants. For Shelly, a miscarriage in her 13th week was the welcomed and accepted conclusion of a clearly unhealthy pregnancy:

You know there’s like twenty different kinds of miscarriages? My first one was a missed miscarriage. So the fetus passed at eight weeks, but my body did not let me know ‘til 12/13 weeks. So for a whole month, I am carrying around something that is not supposed to be there. That’s toxic and I’m feeling like shit. I couldn’t wait for it to end. I was like I’ve never been pregnant before but I know it ain’t supposed to feel like this. This is some bullshit! So when I realized what was happening, I was like, “Praise Jesus. I am drinking soon as I get home!” — Shelly, 40, hospital, planned cesarean birth

In sharp contrast, Adrienne’s two stillbirths represented the tragic loss of her children and her hope of becoming a mother. Her religious belief allows her to look forward to being reunited with her lost children, and she keeps their memory alive through prayer:

It’s just been really a process but my strong belief is I will see my son again. I believe in an after life and I believe that he’s waiting for me there so I do have a lot of hope. And I did have a second miscarriage after that. It was earlier in my pregnancy but too early to tell what the sex was or anything but in my mind I feel like it’s a little girl that’s in heaven and her name is Hope. And that’s for me, it’s like… and I have this urn with my son’s ashes and it’s a teddy bear so I can sleep with it whenever like I’m into ritual for healing and so we had a whole altar devoted to family. There was like an altar with the teddy bear and things and so that’s been really helpful for me but I have a little bear one of those tiny little bears, it’s a prayer…it’s a bear praying on its knees and the name of the bear is Hope so I have the two bears together. — Adrienne, 27, birth center, vaginal birth

Most of the women who had experienced pregnancy loss used spiritual and religious understandings to give meaning to their experience. For Shelly, a deep desire to know and follow God’s will allowed her to feel cared for and loved during her miscarriage. Her beliefs helped her to see her several miscarriages as part of a Divine plan:

I feel like miscarriages are a natural part of our gynecological journey. I feel like it is as natural as having periods. I had a miscarriage before I had [child]. And then I had [child] and then I had miscarriage after [child]. The way I am, I feel like God knows what’s best for me. The timing isn’t mine so even though it may have been my plan, it wasn’t His plan at the time. And whatever is meant to be is going to be. It’s like when you move, I move, Lord. You say go to the left and cool, I am over to the left. You say I am not pregnant, cool I am over to the right now. It wasn’t a— The hardest part about having a miscarriage for me was dealing with everybody else’s feelings around it. Because you wind up being like, “I’m fine.” Now I am trying to comfort you because you’re stressed out about what is going on with me. I had friends who went into depression when they found out I had a miscarriage. And I was like, “I can’t even deal with you right now because I am not depressed. I am feeling relieved. My body was suffering.” — Shelly, 40, hospital, planned cesarean birth

Text to SUBSCRIBE or click on the image to subscribe with email

Traditional African American and African cultures share a worldview in which the material and metaphysical worlds co-exist and are interrelated. For many black people in the U.S., traditional practices such as ancestral dreams continue to provide us with guidance, advice and even requests from the Spirit World.21 While ancestral dreams involve important elders who have passed on, such as a parent or grandparent, some of our participants also reported that the Spirit of their unborn child spoke to them. For Amara, a dream gave her notice that one of the twins that she was carrying was not going to make it. When she later suffered from bleeding, and learned that she was now only carrying one fetus, her dream served as a source of solace and meaning:

I had a dream, oh I forgot this part… I totally forgot! This is an important part. So I had this dream and in the dream there was these two little kids. It was a little girl and a little boy. And the little girl was saying “come on come on Let’s go come on it’s gonna be great!” And the little boy was pulling back and saying, “No, No, I don’t want to go.” And then I woke up and it was like I knew it was them. [Tearfully] you know in [African] spirituality we believe that some children are just spirit children they’re never meant to be here. Sometimes they get born into the world but they just want to be with their own kind they don’t want to be out here so…[tearfully] So that’s why I already had a name for him because I really felt like I had a relationship with both of them. I knew that [child] was on the way and that [African name]–that means God is merciful–was not gonna make it. — Amara, 41, hospital, vaginal birth

While the women in our study found ways to understand and cope with pregnancy and infant loss, they also struggled with external and internalized beliefs that made the experience of pregnancy or infant loss more painful. The first was the belief that they had done something to contribute to the death of their fetus or child. This belief may be the inadvertent result of public health messaging that encourages women to have a healthy pregnancy by avoiding unhealthy choices. For women who suffer pregnancy loss, this messaging can result in self-blame or blame by others close to her:

I was in excruciating, excruciating, excruciating pain. They told me I was pregnant and my fallopian tube had ruptured. The baby had latched on [sic] and she was like, “I can just give you some pills that we give cancer patients to kill radiation or something.” I’m like, “That doesn’t even sound right! No! I am not taking it.” She told me the only other way is to go into surgery and remove my fallopian tube. I said, “Do that.” It was very sad. He was there and I was just crying. My poor baby was trying to grow and it couldn’t grow- there was just not enough room. I was thinking maybe because I smoked or did I drink something? Did I drink too heavy one night? Like what did I— Was it something I did? But like she [participant] was saying, I think God has a plan. Some times it’s right, some times it’s not. — Kaela, 31, hospital, vaginal birth

We gotta normalize our language around miscarriages more. When you go through and feel like you’re the only one, no one wants to talk to you about it. It was people in my circle who had had ‘em but didn’t want to tell me about it. That had to be what they were going through. It doesn’t have to be a community process, you know. It would have been cool if you would have been like ‘It’s going to be ok, I have been there before’. But I didn’t get that. From anybody. I was like my own personal- I just had to puff myself back up and get through it. You know what I mean? I don’t mind telling people I have been through it if they want to know. It’s hormonal. It’s not because I had that glass of wine. It’s not because I got stressed out at work, you know what I mean? And they psyche us all out to think that all this stuff… was in our control and it never was. — Shelly, 40, hospital, planned cesarean birth

How Racism Harms Pregnant Women – And What Can Help

The second belief is the idea that the non-viable “fetus” is not a real “life” or child. In this era of fetal politics, where women with substance abuse issues are being prosecuted for “supplying drugs to a minor,” and home birthing women have been detained for “child endangerment,” it is vital that we do not separate out the legal identity of an unborn child/fetus from its mother. Doing so simply sets up the conditions for low-income pregnant people and pregnant people of color to be policed and punished.22 However, we also need to be careful not to utilize terminology and practices that pregnant women find dehumanizing. Most of the pregnant women in our study experienced an intense emotional and spiritual bond with their fetus/unborn child that deserves to be acknowledged. For Shelly (above) and Cindy, both of whom experienced a pregnancy that could not continue full term for medical reasons, the idea that their non-viable fetuses were going to be terminated and disposed of as medical waste was unacceptable:

We went in for an ultrasound, and it was supposed to be the one where if you want you can find out the gender, although we didn’t want to find out the gender. And the technician said, I’m going to need to call someone else in here. And she left. And this other guy came in and he was so short with words, and he basically said, “The baby’s spine stops at the neck, the baby has no brain.” [Tearfully] He said, “There’s just fluid in its head, and you’re going to need to see a specialist. “[Chokes] What? We had almost brought my older child with us to the ultrasound and we didn’t… I can’t even remember what its called right now, I think I’m blocking it out, but if your spinal cord doesn’t fully develop and there’s no brain, the children they don’t live, They might live a week or two, but they wouldn’t have any functioning, they’d be like a vegetable, they don’t have a brain so they can’t do anything. And so we had to decide fairly quickly because of how far we were along what to do. Whether to carry the baby to term and then deal with the baby dying. [Oh God] Or to terminate the pregnancy. And we made the decision that we were going to terminate the pregnancy and had to pay for a lot of that out of pocket. We had insurance but I felt, I’d carry this baby for so many months and they were going to flush it as medical waste? We wanted to have the remains and we wanted to at least bury it, or cremate it. We had to pay thousands of dollars for that. And its money we didn’t have. It’s on my credit card just rolling over year after year. But it was a part of us, and having gone through an abortion before I was just, I can’t. This isn’t medical waste. — Cindy, 35, hospital, vaginal birth, VBAC

One of BWBJ’s goals is to reduce infant and maternal mortality by transforming our nation’s maternal health-care system. At the same time, we recognize that miscarriage and stillbirth will always be a part of our pregnancy narrative. Black women who experience miscarriage and stillbirth need sensitive, non-blaming, culturally sensitive care that recognizes the meanings they ascribe to their pregnancies, and to pregnancy loss. Pregnant individuals who have to have a medically required abortion, rather than elective one, are likely to have a very different relationship to the fetus, experiencing it as a loved but unborn child, and caregivers should recognize this. In addition to providing counseling and support services, health insurance companies should provide coverage for dealing with the child’s remains in a culturally and spiritually appropriate way.

This is a three part series and excerpt from the new book, Battling Over Birth: Black Women and the Maternal Health Care Crisis.

Part Two: Stress, Pregnancy and the “Strong Black Woman” Syndrome

]]>http://kindredmedia.org/2018/02/battling-birth-black-women-maternal-health-care-crisis-part-two/feed/0Battling Over Birth: Black Women And The Maternal Health Care Crisis: Part Onehttp://kindredmedia.org/2018/02/battling-birth-black-women-maternal-health-care-crisis-part-one/
http://kindredmedia.org/2018/02/battling-birth-black-women-maternal-health-care-crisis-part-one/#respondThu, 08 Feb 2018 22:21:43 +0000http://kindredmedia.org/?p=21104This is part one of a three part series and excerpt from the new book, Battling Over Birth: Black Women and the Maternal Health Care Crisis. Part One: Prenatal Care Barriers Part Two: Stress, Pregnancy and the “Strong Black Woman” Syndrome Part Three: Midwifery Model of Care “Battling Over Birth is a critical and timely […]

Part One: Prenatal Care Barriers

“Battling Over Birth is a critical and timely resource for understanding black women’s birthing experiences in the United States, a country where black women’s lives—and the lives they create—are at much greater risk of death and injury than those of non-black women … By distilling the common and diverse threads from over 100 black women, the BWBJ researchers have woven a multi-faceted tapestry that reflects what black women view as important and central to optimal birth experiences. Their recommendations for improving care and outcomes are grounded in black women’s authoritative knowledge. …This wonderful, important, necessary research by and for black women points in the direction that black women think we should go to ensure they have safe, healthy, and satisfying birth experiences and outcomes. We need to listen and act.”

Battling Over Birth: Prenatal Care Barriers

Part One

Experiences of Prenatal Care

Despite media images and popular beliefs to the contrary, pregnancy is not a medical condition and childbirth is not a medical emergency. Nevertheless, prenatal care is a critically important element in ensuring that pregnant people and their infants are as safe and healthy as possible. Relevant prenatal care can be effective in reducing preterm birth and high-risk pregnancy complications.1 Black women are more likely to go into labor before 37 weeks, and to give birth to infants who weigh below the low birthweight threshold of 5 pounds, 8 ounces.2 Since premature and low birth weight infants are at greater risk of dying, access to good quality prenatal care can be a matter of life and death. Prenatal care can also be instrumental in identifying any health concerns that may impact the mother’s physical wellbeing, including high blood pressure, which could be an indication of pre-eclampsia, or gestational diabetes. Studies have shown that maternal mortality rates are lowest for women who started prenatal care in their first trimester, and highest for those with little or no prenatal care.3

Despite the disparities regarding black infant and maternal mortality and morbidity (illness), it is important to note that most black pregnant individuals experience normal, healthy pregnancies that do not require any medical interventions. Nevertheless, all pregnant people can benefit from effective prenatal care that provides emotional reassurance and practical advice during an emotionally and physically vulnerable time.

Previous studies have found that African American women are less likely to receive adequate and timely prenatal care than white women.4 The women in our study reported a number of barriers to accessing, and persisting with prenatal care. These included: lack of or inadequate health insurance coverage, distrust of and poor treatment by prenatal care providers, and culturally inappropriate care.

Barriers to Prenatal Care: Health Insurance

Prior to the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA, also known as ObamaCare), women routinely paid more than men for the same health insurance coverage, 90 percent of individual health plans failed to provide maternity benefits, and in all but five states, being pregnant was a pre-existing condition that prevented a person from purchasing health insurance.5 Several of our participants gave birth prior to the creation of the Health Insurance Marketplace. Rashida6 moved to the Bay Area during her pregnancy. She shared how the pre-existing condition clause impacted her efforts to find a local caregiver:

I’ve had prenatal care since I was five weeks, but I don’t know who’s delivering my baby, my insurance in Baltimore city stops in August, the doctor I go to doesn’t accept state issued insurance, nobody will take me after seven months, so I don’t know how I’m delivering her, I don’t know how this is gonna work. I’m very much an always take care of my business type of person, and then it just so happens, I’m about to have a baby, and everything falls apart. — Rashida, home birth, vaginal birth 7

Birth in America for black mothers: a documentary film, The American Dream

The Affordable Care Act was designed to ensure that healthcare is affordable, universally available and non-discriminatory. The ACA has provided access to health insurance to an additional 7.7 million women in the U.S.8 A number of women who participated in our study were uninsured or underinsured in relation to pregnancy and childbirth. Nine percent of the women in our study reported that they did not have health insurance that covered their prenatal care and childbirth. An additional two percent reported that their health coverage was inadequate or was terminated during their pregnancy.

However, since our research took place between 2011-2016, and the Affordable Care Act extended insurance coverage during this time, it is to be hoped that the number of black women in California accessing health-care has improved. However, media stories indicate that the ACA is leaving some pregnant women paying out-of-pocket for prenatal care and delivery, or going without care.9 Our research suggests that more data is needed to determine whether black pregnant women are falling between the cracks of the new health-care system. One participant identified a dilemma facing women in low-to-middle-income families–she was unable to afford a private plan, but earned too much to qualify for Medi-Cal or receive assistance from free
health programs:

We moved to California and being a person with preexisting condition, health insurance is extremely traumatizing to me as well. I’ve had bouts in my life where I haven’t had health insurance and I’ve run out of supplies. It’s just scary to know that my country doesn’t care about me. I’m not a criminal. I’ve never been arrested. I’ve never been on welfare. I’ve never used any type of government assistance. I’ve worked since I was 15 years old. I have a Master’s degree. And I just felt like my country could give a shit. It’s like, die, who cares about you. And I’ve always felt that way. It just makes me really sad to think no one cares… [O]nce I found out that we were pregnant, people were like, “Go to Lifelong, go to Planned Parenthood, go to West Oakland Health Center, go here, go here, they’ll help you.” I went to all of those places and they were all like, “You’re not poor enough.” I was like, “I have a three year old, I’m diabetic, I’m pregnant, I need help.” They were like, “You’re not poor enough.” Once again, I just felt like a big F U. I’m a high-risk pregnancy. Anything can be going on inside my body right now. I need to go to a doctor. “Nope. Sorry.” Regina, 32, hospital, planned cesarean birth

Denying pregnant people access to prenatal care–care that in some instances can be life-saving–is a human rights violation that infringes Article 3 of the UDHR. Clearly more work is required to ensure that black women, alongside all pregnant people of color and low- and middle-income people receive universal access to prenatal care regardless of their economic status.

Barriers to Prenatal Care: Relationships with Medical Practitioners

A second barrier to receiving adequate prenatal care involved relationships with prenatal care providers that were characterized by lack of rapport, respect and trust. Where lack of health insurance is a barrier to accessing prenatal care, conflictual or poor relationships with medical practitioners can be a significant barrier to persistence with prenatal care beyond the first few visits. In addition, women who receive care that they perceive as disrespectful or discriminatory for a first pregnancy, are more likely to avoid prenatal care in future pregnancies.

In some instances, participants attended one or two prenatal visits and then decided that the experience was stressful and counter-productive for their emotional and physical wellbeing. In other cases, participants continued to attend out of a sense that this is what they “should” do, but were extremely unhappy with the care they received.

I actually broke up with her [my ob-gyn] very early in my pregnancy because I had some sort of, I don’t know if it was an infection, and I was in her office and she was saying what she thought I should do and I was saying what I thought I should do, and I wanted to try a more natural remedy, and I could see the look on her face. She said, “Ok I’m going to step out.” She stepped out of the room, I’m not even dressed and I’m not even clear if she was coming back. I sat in there probably 15 minutes and I was cold and I thought, I don’t know if she’s coming back, or if she’s pissed because I’m not doing what she wants… It was just a glimmer of who she might be as a care provider. So I left crying and I thought I’ve got to find somebody else. Cindy, 35, hospital, vaginal birth, VBAC

So even just walking into the hospital, I’d be, oh my God here we go. I have to deal with this foolishness. It was just to the point where they [the nurses] would have conversations over my head while they’re taking my blood pressure, about what’s going on this weekend. And I’m like, I don’t want to hear none of this. So I think I already would come in with a lot of attitude, and so I just hated coming to my prenatal appointments. Theresa, 42, birth center, vaginal birth

Young mothers, especially those in their teens were particularly at risk of having their autonomy stripped by medical practitioners, who tended to view them as lacking in the ability to make healthy, responsible decisions:

Prenatal care was the worst though. That was my worst experience… I coulda had all kinda medical problems and would have never known. And at that point I didn’t care, because I’m like: you are not going to violate me every time I come to this hospital, and tell me how you feel about my situation, my decisions and my body. That’s what would happen. So I stopped going… And it’s still happening to this day. I heard women do the same thing, say: “I’m not going to get prenatal care.” There could be a lot of serious issues going on with your baby, you would never know. And I didn’t care, I was like, God gonna bless me, I’m gonna pray, cause I’m not getting treated [like that]. With my fourth son I think I went in two times to the doctor with him. Because I felt like I love me more than they love me. I’m gonna look our for my baby versus these people touching me, saying they checking on us. So it was a hard road being a teen mom. Zanthia (see my story Zanthia)

A frequently expressed concern among women who received prenatal care with an ob-gyn was the belief that their physician did not support their vision for their birth. This was most commonly evidenced in lack of support for their desire to have a vaginal birth:

[M]y gynecologist at the time, he would bring up things that would bring up a weird energy in me. So then I said, let me start looking into some things. Cause almost every conversation I would have with him, from the time they confirmed I was pregnant was, you know, it ended up in a C-section. Every single conversation. And I would try and turn it around. You know, he’s a family doctor, he’s been in our family for years, so I would talk to my mom and she would say, well just talk to him. Every conversation, we still ended talking about a C-section. So I just stopped going to the appointments. Jordan, 31, hospital, vaginal birth

One of the participants described her experience of attending a prenatal visit for a scheduled external cephalic version–an attempt to turn her baby that was in breech presentation (feet first). Like Jordan above, she was convinced that the physician had very little interest in avoiding a cesarean birth. She was also alienated by his tone and affect toward her:

[S]o I got up there and the doctor, this white man who I’ve never met before in my life… I was just so scared and I hear the woman who is next door to me who is an African American woman. And he’s like, “Hey, how you doing? So this is your second pregnancy?” “Yeah.” “Oh so your baby’s breech?” “Yeah” I mean this is literally the time in between as he’s talking to her.

And he’s like, “Okay let’s give it a try…Nope, didn’t work. Let’s give it another try…Nope didn’t work. Okay Mrs. Thomas, so I’m going to set you up for a C-section on du-du-du-du- da,” gave her the appointment, she was out the door. And I’m listening, looking at my partner like, “Do you hear what he’s doing next door? That is not going to happen to us.” So then he comes next door into our room, our little room separated by the curtain and he’s like, “Oh, she didn’t take the medicine?” And he was like, “Oh fine, well that’s her choice.” He was just really rude. And so he literally just places his hands on my womb and I just got so tense, I just froze, you know. He’s like, “And it didn’t work.” And then it was time number two for him to try and I just had thought “Okay if this doesn’t work, I’m going to be in here for a C-section,” you know. And so I just surrendered. And he turned my baby around. Zaria, 34, home birth, vaginal birth

Text to SUBSCRIBE or click on the image to subscribe with email

Medical practitioners often work under difficult conditions that are not conducive to excellent service provision. Some of the participants recognized that there were structural barriers that prevented their ob-gyn or nurse practitioner from providing a more caring, informative and attentive service. The three key structural barriers were:

HMO model of care, which requires fast turnover of large numbers of patients, resulting in ten-minute appointments with busy and sometimes distracted medical staff.

the staff rotation system, whereby the pregnant person sees whoever is on rotation that day, rather than receiving consistent care from a medical professional who can get to know her.

I didn’t really have any specific doctor. It was a whole bunch of white ladies… My whole pregnancy, it was hella hot, they never had no snacks for me coming up in that hospital. I was hella pregnant and hungry. I was tired, I was wearing flats, my feet were swollen. There was no comfortable chair, the environment was, you were like, “This place’s kinda low budget.” Nadia, 22, hospital, vaginal birth

I started out going to see an ob-gyn at [HMO]… [A]ll of the good doctors were busy so I just ended up seeing this random woman, and she was pleasant and everything but the visits were 10 minutes. “So who are you?” No rapport whatsoever, so I think about two visits in I was like, “No, I’m not doing this, it’s not worth it.” Aliyah, 21, home birth, vaginal birth

Black women seeking prenatal care are impacted by interlocking systems of race, class, gender and age. Low-income black women often attend clinics and public hospitals that suffer from underfunding and understaffing. As black women, they enter a medical system from which historically, black people have been denied access, or incorporated as subjects of medical experimentation so that white patients could benefit. This toxic legacy of racism is described by Harriet Washington as “medical apartheid,” leading to ‘black iatrophobia”, fear and mistrust of (white) doctors by black people rooted in mistreatment and exploitation. In the context of the Sharing Circle with other black women, many of the participants felt no need to explain these feelings of mistrust and alienation; simply referring to a “white man” or “bunch of white ladies” indicated the social distance between them. One of the participants, whose relationship to race was more complex than some of the other participants due to her biracial identity, articulated the way in which societal racism and previous experiences of discrimination can impact the relationship with a white practitioner:

“Just so you know, like race and racism, those are big issues in my world being a person of color; I’m a black woman. I did come from a white mother, but I’m a black woman [laughs]. So there’s things that I see that white folks do that can really rub me the wrong way… so it was a big step for me to embrace her [white midwife]. Kara, hospital, unplanned cesarean birth

The following section explores how lack of cultural humility can exacerbate mistrust by black women of white medical practitioners and other nonblack care providers.

Barriers to Prenatal Care: Lack of Cultural Humility by Providers

Birthing While Black: An Interview With Midwife Jennie Joseph

A third barrier to accessing and persisting with prenatal care is a lack of cultural humility.10 In a context where behaviors and choices shaped by a Euro-American worldview and cultural context are viewed as appropriate, rationale and responsible, black women are vulnerable to judgment, shaming and coercion by well-meaning medical professionals who are unaware of their own implicit biases.

A site of significant stress and conflict between medical professionals and participants in the study was diet, nutrition and body weight. Prenatal care providers are concerned about women categorized as overweight and obese because these women have a higher risk of maternal mortality and morbidity. They are also concerned about diet and nutrition because of the disproportionate African American babies that are born with low birthweight. In contrast, advocates for big women, known as “fat activists,” argue that labeling and judging big women creates stigma and shaming that is counterproductive to efforts to create healthful, nonjudgmental and supportive environments for these women.11 In addition, black feminist scholars have identified the racial and cultural bias behind ideas about normative and ideal body types, including “boylike,” slim-waisted and -hipped woman.12 In black communities, alternative ideas of beauty and different body ideals exist, leading to a greater acceptance and celebration of roundness and curves, and an appreciation for “thick” women. At the same time, in sharp contrast to the controlling image of black women consuming large amounts of fried soul food, many black women eat “natural,” wholefood diets, including vegetarian or vegan diets and avoid American staples like burgers and processed bread as part of a natural, Afrocentric lifestyle.

Nadia, a big and young woman, experienced her prenatal care provider’s constant exhortations to eat less or to consume different foods as Eurocentric and blaming:

It was a good hospital, but the medical industry just like a lot of industries in America, it’s very white. You gotta accept that and roll with it. It’s very awkward, being a woman of color, being that my stature is so large, I’m a big woman. There’s nobody in that room who could be, “I feel you.” [I relate to you] Or they’re like, “What are you eating throughout your pregnancy?” And I’m like, “This is what we eat.” And they’re like, “Oh that’s not healthy.” Or, “Oh you’re gaining too much weight.” Where in reality, the medical standards are very off and not culturally relevant. Nadia, 22, hospital, vaginal birth

Regina, a big woman who was pregnant with twins, experienced her prenatal care provider’s scrutiny of her diet and lack of weight gain as oppressive and judgmental:

When I’d go into the doctor and they would call me and ask me what have I been eating, I just felt so judged. They’re like, “You’re not eating enough, you’re not eating enough. You have two babies; you need to eat way more than a normal pregnancy. You need to eat more.” You’re telling me I need to eat more and I’m not gaining enough weight, but I’m a big girl. In my head it was hard to be like, eat more. I’ve never been told to eat more. Usually I’m told to lose weight. It was a really hard thing for me to understand. I wasn’t hungry. I felt like I was eating enough for myself. I wasn’t hungry, I didn’t feel like I was weak or tired. I was still working. But I wasn’t gaining enough weight. I feel like I wasn’t getting those A’s. Regina, 32, hospital, planned cesarean birth

Similarly, Hannah who was seeing a nutritionist due to being categorized as underweight early in her pregnancy felt that she was judged for not eating a diet that conformed to Euro-American norms:

Amara: Yeah they are quite judgmental too. I remember my nutritionist she tried to be really, really nice, but she basically… She had me write everything down I ate for about a week and bring it in and all. She looks and she said you basically don’t eat anything, do you? I am like, that made no sense to me. I mean what she meant was because I am a vegetarian, I eat a lot of tofu, brown rice, vegetables, you know. But I mean I eat stuff, obviously. I have been around for forty years, I have probably eaten, you know? Yeah and she was like, “You know you have to double your caloric intake,” or something like that. But she should’ve just said [puts on gentle voice] “We want you to double your calories.” Instead she said. “You really don’t eat anything!”

BWBJ: You mean the American diet where everything is super-sized?

Amara: Right.

Hannah: Why don’t you go to McDonald’s?

Amara: Right, exactly. [Everyone laughing.] That’s what she was looking for. What, there are no french fries?

Join the LiberateBlackBirth Campaign! With the release of Battling Over Birth, Black Women Birthing Justice are launching a campaign to transform the maternal health-care system in California. Join us!! Together we can ensure that black women and pregnant individuals have the right to birth with safety and autonomy, where, how and with whom they choose.

It is generally assumed that women who have a high commitment to health and self-care are more likely to attend prenatal appointments, and to follow the suggestions they receive from health-care providers. In contrast, for some of the women in the study, removing themselves from “care” that they experienced as stressful, blaming, violating or disrespectful was an act of self-care and love for their unborn child. As Zanthia above states, “I love me more than they love me. I’m gonna look out for my baby.” While this is a logical response to “care” that actually creates more stress for the pregnant person, it also has significant risks in the infrequent cases in which women or their infants experience a health crisis (see My Story: Zanthia). When women report that they are avoiding prenatal care despite health-care coverage that makes it affordable for them, it may be tempting to label them as irresponsible and to blame them for any negative consequences. However, this study has demonstrated that for some women, avoiding prenatal care is a rational response to inadequate and stressful care by providers who they experience as cold, disinterested, disrespectful or Eurocentric. If black women’s pregnancy experiences and outcomes are to improve, it is essential that medical professionals are trained to provide care that is affirming, empowering and culturally relevant.

MY STORY: Zanthia13

Zanthia is a working class African American woman, doula, parenting educator and mother of eight children, four of whom she birthed before she was 20 years old. She has experienced prenatal care in Oakland, CA, over a two decade period, and feels emotionally scarred by many of those experiences:

I got a lot of negative experiences at the hospital, being a teen mom. Prenatal care was the worst though. That was my worst experience. That’s what I said. I coulda had all kinda medical problems and would have never know. And at that point I didn’t care, because I’m like, you are not going to violate me every time I come to this hospital. And tell me how you feel about my situation, my decisions and my body. That’s what would happen. So I stopped going. Because I was in teen mother classes all through high school, they told me when I got in 12th grade, you can’t go no more, cause you could teach the class. I was pregnant all the time. Even with all that experience and knowing about my body, I never had respect as a mother going to the hospital wanting to get care.

And my friends, because I went to class with them, they had the same experience. When they went to prenatal care, very few of them had doctors that would explain things to them about their bodies, or talk about they had choices. It was always getting told what to do. I seen them get late term abortions because these doctors felt that you don’t need to be having a baby, and they would convince their parents to do this. And I seen them. I would talk to my peers about this so I knew it wasn’t just my experience going to the hospital being treated like this…

Well, after my first one at 14, I stopped going to prenatal visits regularly. Because of how I’d get treated when I go. The prenatal visits were scary. They would talk about me. And even though I had my eighth one and I was 40, I still got treated [badly], cause people thought I was younger. They wouldn’t look at my age. I’ve had nurses literally come back and forth giving me birth control, not even the kind I’m scheduled for but offering me what they thinking. I had to file a complaint on her because I felt invaded because I’m not a teenager no more. And I have post-traumatic stress disorder because of that. Seriously. I didn’t get prenatal care with my second, third, fourth. The only reason I got it with the fifth was ‘cause… I wanted to see the ultrasound. Then the sixth and the seventh I kind of went, but if I felt any of that type of [disrespect]… I had doctors telling me to go ahead and get an abortion. Just go ahead and get an abortion. I mean recently. When I had my fourth one. So this was not light years ago.

During my pregnancy with my eighth child, I noticed that I had some unusual swelling and went to my ob-gyn to get it checked out. I had a black doctor at [HMO], I went in to see her. She said, “Your blood pressure’s too high. I’m not seeing you.” I was like, “Huh? You’re not goin’ to see me? And she was like, you have to take these pills and that’s the only way I’ll see you… So I felt offended. I felt like, I’d had kids since I was 14 so I had been abused a lot by hospitals in all different kind of ways with birthing my children. So for me to go in there and a black woman to tell me, you’re not going to help me because my blood pressure’s high and I’m high risk and you’re not going to have a dead woman and baby…So she referred me to the high-risk clinic. And I got a Caucasian man that was my doctor and he was like, “You done had 8.” This was my eighth baby. So he was like, “You tell me.” And we worked pretty good. He didn’t put me on the medication, because that was my concern and I was trying to talk to her about it and she said she wouldn’t see me unless I got on the medication. And I was like; mmm I want some alternatives here.

At 27 weeks pregnant, I went to the hospital ‘cause I was swollen and couldn’t breathe. The doctors found two litres of fluid on my lungs. I was drowning in my own fluid… if I’d stayed home a couple more days, I’d have been dead at home. So I had an emergency C-section; my little girl weighed a mere two pounds, two ounces. During the coming weeks my daughter stayed in an incubator in the NICU. One day, they came out and told me she had stopped breathing. I never saw any of my kids not breathing. And to have a child not breathing, that was like; Wow. Not my baby. All my babies breathe. On top of that I couldn’t trust the doctors and nurses that were supposed to care for my baby, because of what I’d been through. You got to be careful who care for your kids and I knew that. Just cause people have those positions don’t mean that they’re safe healthy people that have good intentions cause they’re nurses or doctors. I knew that though. So it was traumatic. I had to see a therapist. I had to do a lot of intense stuff to leave my baby there. Cause I didn’t feel safe and I didn’t feel she was safe leaving her there.

My baby got better and eventually I took her home, but it was really, really traumatic for me. So I’m thankful that we’re doing this [Sharing Circle] and to be part of this [research]. Cause I’ve had some cruel things and being a teen mom a lot of the times happen during my birth. And I can related to so many people’s stories of the unfair things and the cruelty that happens during childbirth. And that if we can’t get support around it… they don’t look so beautiful any more, they don’t bring the joy, cause I gotta be loved first before I can give it to somebody else.